In the beginning, customer support tools are used to mitigate the need for real people to constantly be manning the front lines of your store. Over time, the demand bubbles up and there is no stopping the flood of inquiries that follows a successful store. As the inquiries come in, its your job to manage them, categorize them, and then find technology solutions that help solve them -first by mitigating as many problems as you can, and then second by answering the questions as quickly and thoroughly as possible to leave the customer (or prospective customer) feeling satisfied.

As you grow, more problems start to emerge, and you need people to handle these problems, with the tools only being there to help streamline the use of your team's (or outsourced teams) time. Aside from basic ticket mitigation strategies that come from the onset - like having a clear FAQ page and policies - you are going to want to make your first major investment right around the time you hire your first support agent or support manager. This person needs a tool, or a few tools, to help them not only do a great job today, but improve the process for tomorrow.

Typically your head of Ecommerce, head of operations, customer service manager, or if the company is small, you as the CEO will be managing these tools yourself. The goal is to get this out of your hair as quickly as possible, which is why I always recommend your first couple of hires in customer service/support be a little bit above the paygrade - hire for experience, and hire management quality people early and it will save you tons in the long run, especially for high-growth brands.

By far, this is the most important category for making sure your support tools integrate with the rest of your stack -be it your Shopify, your helpdesk, your chat, your SMS, your CRM, or even your loyalty and review tools. You need integrations.

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On top of that, you want tools that really understand the needs of Ecommerce well. This isn't SaaS support, it's not enterprise, its Ecommerce, and we have relatively basic needs that we want to scale from. Make sure the tool caters towards these needs and watch out for overly robust, "bells and whistles" type tools that cost more than you need to be paying.