Overview
Today we are going to be addressing a “pain-point” that comes up regularly in our discussions with our small and medium-size business clients.
The issue that many such businesses face has to do with offering timely support to their customers. Specifically we are referring to the business operator’s ability to collect, organize and address customer inquiries – online.
While enterprise-sized businesses can staff call centers and have web-based live-chat operators taking questions and offering customer service, a smaller business needs a cost-effective, yet efficient alternative for gathering and addressing customer feedback. A ticketing system – as part of a help desk software platform – is, in our opinion, the best such alternative.
The customer support platform that we will be reviewing in today’s article is Wix Answers – a comprehensive “all-in-one” help desk solution.
Product Features
Lets go over a few of the features and benefits of the the platform, that drew our attention –
Wix Answers does not require an IT skill-set which should appeal to business and website operators with a limited IT budget. The web-based software is easy to navigate, with an intuitive interface and easily understandable menus and options. It is also template-based so putting together your help desk is a breeze. At the same time users also have the ability to customize the help center interface to match their brand.
Multi-channel support is another strong feature of Wix Answers – allowing users to offer customer support via phone, email, social media and web forms.
One feature, in particular, that we found very impressive and useful – and the feature that we will be focusing on, in this article, is the help center widget.
Wix Answers offers two types of widget – a “Knowledgebase Module” which makes it easy for your customers to search your knowledge base for helpful product information – and a “Messaging Module” which makes it easy for your customers to request assistance. The Messaging Module is the widget which we will be discussing in depth.
In-depth Feature Discussion and Demo
A Messaging Module can be built and added to your website in just a few steps.
Configure Widget Style and Branding – here you are able to customize the look and feel of the widget, altering the color and shape of the widget to match the design of your site.
Configure Messaging Module Settings – here you can do a few things such as –
- Configuring the contact form fields and labels
- Configuring the messaging that the end user will see
- Determining how tickets can be submitted (with the option to have visitors submit their inquiry via an external contact form or email, in addition to the recommended “Answers Contact Form” option
- Install the widget on your site – this is as easy as copying the javascript generated by the Wix Answers software and placing it before the <body> tag in your website’s html code. This is probably the only part of widget set-up process that requires a bit of technical know-how.
We have, for the purposes of this review, configured and installed a basic Messaging Module widget, here on the 404TS website. It took us only about 10-20 minutes to create and install the module. You can see the widget icon in the right corner of our website. Go ahead and give it a try!
For those of our readers that may be reading this at a time when the widget is no longer on our website, please refer to the screenshots in this article to get a feel for the experience.
Ticketing System Administration
Last, but not least – we will briefly cover the platform “back-end” which allows business operators and administrators to review and address the incoming customer requests. The top-level administrative dashboard looks a lot like an email client with tickets organized into “folders”.
Features of the Wix Answers administrative interface include –
Segmentation of customer tickets by channel ( email, contact form, widget, Facebook)
Easy sorting, labeling and assignment of tickets
Easily viewable customer meta-data (such as location when the request was made and technical data about their device)
Summary
We were impressed with the intuitive nature of the Wix Answers software and the level of customization that it offers. Having supported and engineered a number of custom help desk platforms, for large companies, we can confidently say that the Wix Answers software covers much of the same ground and is more than able to address most of the customer support use-cases that would apply to small and medium-sized businesses.
If we offered customer support through our website, we would keep the Wix Answers Messaging Module widget on 404TS, beyond the purposes of this product review and demo.