Latest from Herodesk

As part of our continuing efforts to help small and mid-sized businesses and webshops improve their customer service, we’re super excited to announce that we’ve built one more integration: Ideal.shop The new Ideal.shop widget integrates Herodesk with your webshop. When you receive a question from a customer, their e-mail address is automatically looked up in your webshop, and all matching orders are shown in Herodesk. Herodesk is the only helpdesk tool for Ideal.shop with a native integration. Here’s how to get started and install the Ideal.shop widget. You need a new API key from Ideal.shopOpen Herodesk and go to Settings -> WidgetsInstall a new Ideal.shop widget. Enter your shop URL, API username and API key That’s it! Now the widget is installed and your customer service ready to be super-charged! If you have more than one Ideal.shop, you can install multiple widgets at no extra cost. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us or contact Ideal.shop support if you need help finding your API key/username.

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Anders Eiler

Nov 17, 2023

Over the past weeks, we’ve been working on two new features that, when used together, are incredibly powerful: Tags and Smart Folders. We’ve created a video announcement of the two new features for the first time. You can see it at the bottom of this post. Tags (also known as “labels”) can be associated with a contact or a conversation. You can create as many tags as you want, and you can associate them with as many contacts or conversations as you want. For example, if you have a set of customers that are very important to you, you can create a “VIP”-tag and add it to those customers. Or if you need priority follow-up on certain conversations, you can create a “Follow-up”-tag and add it to those conversations. That in itself doesn’t do much. But when combined with Smart folders, you get a super powerful feature that can help you in your daily work. Smart folders are rule-based grouping of conversations. For each Smart folder you add, you define one or more rules to determine which conversations are put in them.. For example, you can create a rule saying that whenever a contact has the “VIP”-tag, their conversations should be added to the Smart folder. Or if a conversation has the “Follow-up”-tag, add it to the folder. The list of possibilities is endless, and you can create as many Smart folders as you want for your business needs. For example: For E-commerce: Create a “Return”-tag and add it to conversations when the customer wants to return something. Create a Smart folder that contains conversations that have the tag “Returns” Follow-up: Not all tags have to remain forever. If you need to follow up with a group of customers whenever something happens (fx if a specific product gets back in stock), create a tag for the purpose, tag the conversations and have them easily available when you need to update the customers. General purpose: Feedback and reviews. Whenever a customer sends feedback, give it a label that matches to group them together, making them easy to find in the future. You can create simple or complex rule sets depending on what you need. Rules can also be based on the subject of a conversation, the conversation assignee, or the e-mail address of a contact. Let us know what you think and the different use cases you have where tags and smart folders can help.

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Anders Eiler

Nov 15, 2023

After almost two months of hard work, we’re super excited to finally be able to share this news: Our integration between Herodesk and Shopify has been reviewed and officially approved! So, needless to say, we were pretty excited when this e-mail came in the other day: This is a huge milestone on our mission to be the number one helpdesk tool for small- and mid-sized e-commerce companies. With the approval of our integration and the release of our new Shopify integration, Herodesk is now also a Helpdesk system for Shopify webshops. All Herodesk customers can install our free Shopify widget to get all customer orders, their status, payment status, shipping status, tracking code and all other information directly available inside Herodesk. The Shopify Helpdesk widget is available to both Herodesk Free and Herodesk Plus customers. To get started, go to Settings -> Widgets -> Add Widget and select Shopify. Enter your Shopify webshop address, and you’re ready to go after authentication. If you want to know more about how our Shopify Helpdesk integration works, you can see all the details about the Shopify widget on our Shopify Integration page.

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Anders Eiler

Nov 6, 2023

As more and more people are starting to use Herodesk, the number of conversations being handled grows equally fast. This is true for each Herodesk user as well as Herodesk as a whole. When you open your computer in the morning and have a bunch of conversations waiting for you, sometimes you need to change the status, inbox or assignee of several of them at once. To make this easier, we’ve implemented a new feature to group update conversations. Simply select all the conversations you want to update in the conversations list and update them. Here’s how it works: The aim of this feature is to make it easier for you to manage multiple conversations at the same time and ultimately make your customer support more efficient. This new feature is published to all Herodesk accounts and is ready for you to use. If you have any questions or feedback, please contact us and let us know ?

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Anders Eiler

Nov 2, 2023

Pushing a message to an audience is never easy. There are hundreds of channels that you can use, and then there’s an overlooked, very simple and free one, that most miss: Your e-mail signature! Everybody wants to have a nice signature at the bottom of their emails. It often contains generic things such as your name, title, where you work, some contact information and perhaps the company logo. If you use your signature right, it can become a secret weapon that will help you sell more and give a better service to your customers. This post contains three simple advice on how to supercharge your signature to have it work for you. Display essential informationLet the recipient know who’s writing to them. Always include essential information such as: Your name & title/positionThe company name and logo (make sure the logo is a link to your website)Direct contact information This serves the purpose of letting the recipient know who they’re talking to. Nobody wants to talk to a faceless corporation, so the more personal you can make it, the better. Provide relevant links and informationAdd links to your website and social media profiles to connect with your customers easily. Also include relevant service information, such as your opening hours, links to FAQ, help center, return forms, etc. The purpose of this is to make it easier for the recipient to find information about your business they often need. Add promotions The real power lies in adding your current promotions to the end of your signature. The more specific you can be, the better. Fx: Black week: Save up to X% on ABCFree shipping on all orders above XGet the first X months for free if you sign up before Y It is as simple as it sounds. Now, imagine how many more people will be exposed to your messages if your entire team adds it to their e-mail signature. Here's an example of how it can be done: Last week we published a new feature to let you create your own signature in Herodesk. Remember to apply the learnings from this post to your own.

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Anders Eiler

Oct 30, 2023

We just released a new feature that lets you create your own signature in Herodesk. Your signature will automatically be appended to the messages you send in Herodesk. The new signature feature works in two ways: One global signature Create one signature that will be appended to all messages you send, regardless of which inbox the conversation is in. One signature per inbox Create one signature for each of your inboxes. Herodesk automatically detects which inbox a conversation is in and adds the corresponding signature that matches. We’re already seeing how our users use inboxes in many different ways. Some are using them for different teams. Others for different languages. And some even for different brands. The fact that inboxes can be used in many ways makes this feature super powerful, as you get full flexibility always to have a signature matching the context from which you’re writing your message. Each user can set and manage their own personal signature(s). Go to Profile -> Signatures to get started. Signatures are automatically appended to outgoing e-mails. That means they won’t be visible inside Herodesk. We’ve chosen to do it this way to not clutter the conversation view with repetitive and unnecessary information. But don’t worry - the recipient will see them just fine! ;-)

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Anders Eiler

Oct 23, 2023

Today, it was announced by DanDomain, the leading Scandinavian e-commerce platform, that we at Herodesk have become an official DanDomain Partner. DanDomain has thousands of Scandinavian e-commerce merchants across its two e-commerce platforms. With the acknowledgement of Herodesk as an official DanDomain partner, the foundation is laid for an even closer relationship with DanDomain and all DanDomain e-commerce merchants to make it easier than ever to give great customer service. The partnership is built on top of our free integration between Herodesk and DanDomain’s two e-commerce platforms: DanDomain Webshop & Webshop Classic. With these integrations, all DanDomain e-commerce merchants can now have a free helpdesk system tailored to work with their webshop, with features such as: Automatic find and display of all orders placed by the customer you’re chatting with inside HerodeskEasy access to all relevant information about the order and customer, including shipping details (tracking codes) and payment details Create a free Herodesk account today and start using it together with your DanDomain webshop within minutes. The integration only requires your webshop API key, and you’re ready to go (guides are available). For more information, please see: DanDomain partners: https://partners.dandomain.dk/partners/262/herodesk DanDomain Webshop integration: https://herodesk.io/en/integrations/dandomain-webshop Webshop Classic integration: https://herodesk.io/en/integrations/dandomain-classic

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Anders Eiler

Oct 16, 2023

Today, we’re launching a new integration that we’re very excited about: WooCommerce. It is quite similar in functionality to the other e-commerce integrations that we’ve made. When you open a conversation with a customer in Herodesk, all orders from your WooCommerce store that match this customer are automatically imported and shown in the right-hand-side widget. The primary advantages for you working with customer support are: Automatic order look-up. Easily see all information about the customers’ ordersAll the information you need to handle customer enquiries is in one placeShipping details and order tracking information are also displayed (we integrate natively with WooCommerce Shipment Tracking plugin) You can connect multiple WooCommerce stores to Herodesk at no extra cost. This integration has been co-developed with one of our customers. As we’ve said before, new features are, to some extent, being prioritized based on customer feedback and enquiries. So, when one of our customers asked for a WooCommerce integration, and because it is already on our roadmap, we decided to move it up. We spent some time together with the customer, tweaking and tuning the integration to fit both his and most general-purpose needs. In less than three days after the initial request, it was ready! To install it, go to Settings -> Widget -> Add New and choose WooCommerce. Enter your store address and API keys, and you’re ready to go. If you have any feedback on the new WooCommerce integration or Herodesk in general, please don’t hesitate to tell us. With this new integration, we’re happy that Herodesk is now a free helpdesk system for WooCommerce.

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Anders Eiler

Oct 9, 2023

Let me start by being very honest with you: I am no graphic designer. That is probably one of my biggest weaknesses when it comes to running a SaaS business. Therefore, when it became time to create the logo and visual identity for Herodesk back in the summer of 2023, I needed help. I’ve heard about 99designs.com, but never tried it before. The concept is pretty simple: Choose what type of graphic work you need (logo, identity, web, app etc.)Upload your briefGive feedback on incoming proposalsChoose a winner and refine the work with the designer To create the brief I worked with a brand identity framework to put words on the direction and feelings of the brand. It looks like this: If you want to see the full brand identity brief I used, go to our LinkedIn page and comment “brief me up!” and then I’ll send it to you. I chose a “premium contest”, to have only mid- and high-level designers participate. I received more than 300 design proposals from more than 100 different designers. That was pretty overwhelming, to say the least. Next up was going through every proposal and selecting the best. Six designs were chosen to go to the final round. Unfortunately, I can’t share those now (which kind of makes sense, copyright and everything), but it was the six who I felt best grasped the concept, look/feel and identity I was going for. Working with each of them for about a week, trying to narrow in the concept, I finally chose the winner: Some of the keywords that I want the logo to represent are: Young, energetic, simple, friendly, welcoming. At the same time trying to avoid corporate, enterprise, stiff and old-school. All of the aforementioned are also how I hope you’ll experience Herodesk going forward. Finally, I want to share some tips with you, if you want to try out 99designs yourself for graphic work. Consider creating a “blind contest”. In a blind contest, the designers cannot see each other’s work. For the first couple of days, my contest wasn’t “blind”, which meant that the designers were inspired by each other’s proposals, not least because they could see which designs I rated highly (you can give 1 to 5 stars to each design), so a lot of new entries were variants of the ones I rated high. My mistake. After it was made “blind” the designs started to vary a lot and each designer had to express his/her own creativity. The winner was submitted after I made the contest blind. Check for copy-cats. One of the finalists turned out to be a concept widely used by several companies already, so it was disqualified on that basis. A shame… Be thorough and expressive in your brief. The more details you can provide in the brief to express the look, feel and direction of the design you want, the better. You learn during the process. Originally I wasn’t looking for an “avatar”, but instead a logo with the name written out and some twist to make it unique. However, as proposals came in, I fell in love with having an avatar - and a proposal with just that ultimately won. A final thought… The logo is probably 10x more important to me, as the Founder, than to the rest of the world. 90% is good enough. For the last 10%, the time is probably better spent elsewhere. Ultimately, what matters is that the logo and brand identity represents the company, what it does and how it is operated.

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Anders Eiler

Sep 29, 2023

We just added one more feature to Herodesk: You can now add people cc and bcc to your conversations. This is how it works… When you are writing a message to a contact, two new fields are available: cc and bcc. E-mail addresses added to these fields will receive a copy of your message as either “cc” or “bcc” accordingly. One important thing to mention here is that e-mail addresses added as cc/bcc will receive a full copy of the entire conversation, including all sent/received messages in it and also all previously attached files. When you receive a message with someone added as “cc”, they’ll automatically be put on “cc” when you write a reply (you can, of course, remove them if you want to). This feature is only supported on conversations sent via e-mail. We’re still working on adding more channels, such as Facebook/Instagram Messenger, WhatsApp, etc., but since they don’t support the concept of cc/bcc, this feature doesn’t apply to them. Oh, and one more thing… You can now set a custom sender name for each inbox. Go to Settings -> Inboxes and edit one; you’ll see a field like the one below: Use the merge fields to customise it for each of your users or inboxes. It is a perfect way to separate replies from different teams, brands or personalize them if you want to.

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Anders Eiler

Sep 25, 2023

One of our promises is to make our helpdesk system as straightforward as possible while still focusing 100% on the job to be done. In order to help you do that, we’ve released a new feature called Quick Replies. From time to time, your customers will contact you with somewhat similar questions. To make it easy for you and your colleagues to handle them quickly, you can now record “Quick Replies” (also known as “Canned Responses”, “Macros”, etc.) to quickly reply using a template. The main features of this new release are: Create Quick replies that are available to either everyone on your team or just yourselfReplace variables such as {{contact_firstname}} Use built-in keyboard shortcuts to work at light speed (CMD + E for Mac, Ctrl + E for Windows). All Herodesk Free and Herodesk Plus customers can create unlimited amounts of quick replies for free. It’s a great way for you and your team to supercharge your productivity while still giving your customers great service. Go to Settings -> Quick Replies to create your first quick reply now.

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Anders Eiler

Sep 19, 2023

We’ve just released a small but smart feature: Create contact and start conversations. Most of the time, your customers contact you when they need your help. Othertimes, however, you may want to contact the customer about something (and ensure that their reply lands in Herodesk ;) ). Such times could be: Let a customer know that their package is delayedUpdating a customer on the progress of an ongoing projectAny other type direct follow-ups with a customer It’s a great way for you to be proactive with your customers, giving them a better-than-expected customer service. You can start new conversations with any contact that exists in your Herodesk. New conversations are always sent to the contact via e-mail. When the contact replies, the message lands in your Herodesk Inbox and is treated like any other conversation.

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Anders Eiler

Sep 14, 2023

We’re super happy to announce that three new widgets are now available: DanDomain WebshopDanDomain ClassicShoporama The three widgets all have the same functionality: When you open a conversation with the customer, the widget does a look-up in your webshop and fetches all orders that match the customer's e-mail address. All relevant information about that order (status, payment, shipping, products, etc.) is then available and displayed in the right-hand side widget panel. The DanDomain Webshop app also works for all Smartweb, Wannafind, Scannet and Curanet webshops. The DanDomain Classic app also works for the “Webshop 8” system. Here’s how to get started: Open Settings -> WidgetsChoose the widget you wish to installFill out the fields (shop url, api key etc.) and connect the app That’s it! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us or contact either DanDomain support or Shoporama support if you need help finding your API key/access tokens.

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Anders Eiler

Sep 11, 2023

Welcome to Herodesk. This is the new, simple helpdesk tool for your everyday customer success heroes. My name is Anders. I am the founder of Herodesk. Thank you for visiting, reading this blog and hopefully considering trying Herodesk. After more than 15 years as an entrepreneur and an intrapreneur at one of Europe’s largest hosting- and SaaS companies, I’ve decided to start over and start my own company. Again. And this is it! The goal of Herodesk is to be a champion for small and mid-sized businesses, to help make it easier for you and your colleagues to give your customers great, fast and personal service. Happy customers are a key ingredient in a successful business. Throughout my career and the businesses I’ve worked at, advised and invested in, I’ve always believed that the customer was a core pillar. Someone that should be nourished and taken really good care of. Now I want to give other small and mid-sized businesses the best platform possible to provide their customers with great service - and at a reasonable price! Because let’s be honest, there are other solutions trying this already. You will find, however, that Herodesk really stands out on two parameters: 1) Uncompromised focus on the job to be done Herodesk will focus solely on enabling you and your team to give your customers great service by being really, really easy and fast to work with and always have the relevant information at hand. An example of this is widgets that connects to your e-commerce platform, CRM or internal backend system, to show order- or customer informations inside Herodesk. 2) Reasonably priced There will be two packages. Herodesk Free, which lets you have one user and one inbox - but it’s free. As in, completely free! And Herodesk Plus, which will cost $11.95 per user per month and give you full and unlimited access to all current and future features in Herodesk. On top of that, we promise an ever-evolving product that includes you and all our other customers in its development, to ensure that what we deliver is what you and your team of customer success heroes (and yes, I do mean heroes!) need to give great service to your customers. There are already lots of features and concepts on the drawingboard that we can’t wait to implement, but please, don’t let that hold you back from sharing your thoughts and ideas. On this blog we will post regular updates on our product, our company and anything else we find valuable in the customer service space. I hope you’ll read it and share your thoughts. If you want to try Herodesk, you can sign up now already (big button at the top right - impossible to miss it) and be up and running in about 2 minutes. Please share any thoughts and feedback, it will be highly appreciated. Hello, World! Welcome to Herodesk. Stay tuned.

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Anders Eiler

Sep 4, 2023