The Beginner’s Guide to Kartra: Helpdesk

It’s no secret that happy customers are the key to a successful business. That’s where quality customer service comes into play. After all, it’s much more affordable to maintain customer satisfaction than to acquire a new customer (on average, a whopping five times cheaper).

But, for a beginner like me, I didn’t even know where one would start acquiring a customer service team and a helpdesk. I didn’t know I could even have a helpdesk like other websites! But what if I didn’t have the time or funds to sit around all day answering calls and emails?

That’s where Kartra comes into play. Unlike other helpdesk software that you have to pay an extra fee for, Kartra has a Helpdesk feature that integrates with your Kartra-built pages. It will place a floating icon at the bottom of a Kartra Page or, if you choose to embed your Kartra Page into a WordPress site, it will also show on your WordPress site.

You will see that you have options to help your customers over the phone, via email, via live chat and over Skype. And, for someone like me who works a full-time job as well as running a business on the side, it allows you to create canned responses for frequently asked questions so you don’t have to monitor it 24 / 7.

Help yourself to the Kartra Helpdesk:

Getting to the Kartra Helpdesk is very simple. I just clicked “My Helpdesks” in the main navigation on the left and hit the green “+” button to get started.

A pop-up appeared that prompted me to name my Helpdesk. Because it’s for my art site, I named it AndiJanks Art Helpdesk. This is helpful because if you’re managing a few different sites through Kartra, you can easily organize yourself with a good naming system.

Kartra gave me the option to host my Helpdesk on the Kartra platform or use an embed code to place it in a site hosted elsewhere. I am using Kartra to host my website, so I chose to go with the former.

Next, Kartra prompted me to customize my Marquee. My what? There was a tip in yellow at the top of the Marquee section that read “Customize the look and feel of your membership portal by displaying a warm and trust-inspiring imaging. You may choose from any of our stock pictures, or you may simply upload your own.”

If I’m being truthful, I was still a little confused. I don’t have a membership portal, so I wasn’t sure how this applied to my site. So, I emailed customer support to find out.

From there, I had to choose which products to support. However, I was invited to type the product names, to create my Wiki categories, as opposed to actually linking them in the Kartra system. Thus, I could make a product called “all original art” if a customer has a general inquiry rather than a question about a specific piece.

Kartra then gave me the option to create a support wiki. I wasn’t sure what this was, so I clicked in and learned it’s essentially a fully-fleshed out tutorial article library. If you’re selling something like a software that requires instructions, this will be super helpful. However, for my art site, I thought it was a little excessive, so I decided to forego it for the time being.

Furthermore, to finish setting up your Helpdesk fundamentals, you can choose to capture your Helpdesk customers into leads, assign tags and subscribe them to lists and sequences.

Get ahead with canned responses:

Kartra doesn’t just allow you to support customers – it gives you the option of creating pre-set responses and signatures. If you’ve got a big support team, you can have each person create their own signature to be used in customer responses. However, if you’re like me and your team is comprised of me, myself and I, you can just have an owner signature for yourself.

And if you’re using live chat, you can write an introduction for each customer service representative that will appear when someone first messages you.

Note: Your intro message can only be 40 characters max, so keep it brief.

In less than an hour, the Kartra support team emailed me back (good customer service for the win!). Essentially they’re referring to my Helpdesk portal, which is behind a login, just like a membership would be. The “Custom Marquee” setting is to add an image to my Helpdesk pages to improve their look and feel or to match my branding. Users will not see this image unless they’ve clicked through to the Helpdesk through an icon placed on my pages.

For my marquee, Kartra gave me the option to upload my own photo or use one of their customer support stock photos. I chose to keep their preset “happy to help you” text in, but you have the option to customize it to your brand voice.

Kartra also allowed me to choose what channels I want to to use to communicate with my customers. They offer support tickets through email, phone calls, Skype and live chat. I chose to go with Support tickets and Live Chat because I don’t have time to monitor the phone. I was able to set my availability hours and average response time.

While a preset intro message is nice, my favorite feature, by far, is the canned responses. Canned responses are pre-written responses that answer simple and common questions.

For example, I have a pretty standard return policy (30 days, full purchase price refund if the artwork is returned in good condition). This is a great option for a canned response because my answer will be the same for pretty much every refund question that gets thrown my way.

Another great canned response topic is regarding the pricing of a piece. While it can be slightly variable depending on difficulty, I typically charge 70 cents per square inch. So a 16”x20” painting will be about $225, while a 36”x36” will be about $900. Thus, my canned response to an inquiry about a how much a custom piece will cost reads “While I always adjust slightly for difficulty, I typically price my pieces at about 70 cents per square inch.”

Set your desk on your page:

Once I had set up my Helpdesk and equipped it with custom signatures and canned responses, I needed to place it on my page so my customers could actually get help.

To do this, I decided which pages I wanted my Helpdesk icon on (my home page, my product page and my contact page). I clicked into those pages on the page builder. From there, I hit the “Helpdesk” button on the left-side navigation.

There, I was able to choose between a Kartra Helpdesk or a Zendesk Helpdesk. I chose Kartra, of course. However, if you’re using Zendesk, simply click on it and paste your embed code.

Kartra gave me the option to choose from a series of Helpdesk icons in a variety of colors. Once I applied the Helpdesk to my page, it instantly appeared in the bottom right corner. When a user clicks on it, they will be redirected to my Helpdesk page (complete with my customized marquee).

Keep tabs on happy customers:

If you thought I was done, I was…sort of. You see, I completed setting up my customer service Helpdesk, but now I need to see if it’s working.

Kartra’s Helpdesk tool includes a powerful analytics section that lets you see how many tickets you’ve had, how many live chats you’ve had, your average response time, your average tickets per day and your customer satisfaction, based on channel. If you have a big support team, you can even see analytics per team member, to see if one is way ahead of the pack or dragging behind.

Additionally, if you have wiki help articles, it will let you know which articles customers have rated as most (and least) helpful.

These analytics are incredibly useful in adjusting and growing your customer service to keep your clientele happy and loyal. After all, good customer service might just be the thing that tips a customer over to you from a competitor. And that’s a win.

Next up:

Discover how to use Kartra’s affiliate manager to provide coded links for affiliates, manage accounts, payouts and get complete reporting at a glance.