OpenStore introduced OpenDesk, an AI-powered customer support tool that helps brand respond faster to customers and gain insights on their interactions. The tool enables brands to combine all their customer messages into one central dashboard, with messages automatically organized by topic so that teams can prioritize time-sensitive threads and their most valuable customers. (I need that for my Gmail.)
OpenDesk can also auto-draft responses that can be personalized with relevant customer data such as order history, which appear next to the messages pane. Its analytics tools introduce a customer experience metric called “tickets per order” to more accurately evaluate and size the potential impact of customer pain points or opportunities to improve your business.
OpenStore built OpenDesk to support its own customer service needs across the 40+ e-commerce brands it operates, and now it's opening the tool up to other companies.
OpenStore CEO Keith Rabois told Modern Retail that OpenDesk was built because the company was “hiring more and more customer support agents, and they were extremely expensive. We had this epiphany of — while we’re going to solve this problem for ourselves — isn’t this really true for the other five and a half million Shopify stores? Don’t they all have the same challenges and problems as we do?”
I think the move is really smart. Here's what it accomplishes for OpenStore:
- Diversifies their income streams from lower margin e-commerce sales to higher margin software sales (that require no working capital for inventory).
- Creates revenue from a tool that they had already sunk the time into building for themselves anyway.
- Brings new Shopify stores into the OpenStore ecosystem, who could eventually be a fit for their Drive program (where they run your business for 12 months) or a potential acquisition.
Some of the best ideas have come from brand owners who had a need that wasn't being met. Two recent launches come to mind:
- Distro, a made-on-demand platform that manufactures wood products, was launched because the owner Jarek had built out an entire network, process, and technology just for his own business, Lone Birch, so he decided to scale the manufacturing operations beyond his own retail footprint.
- PartnerJam, an affiliate software specifically designed for Shopify apps, was developed by the team at Digismoothie to power the affiliate program of their own portfolio of apps and services, and they later began offering it to other app developers as well.
Something tells me this won't be the last app or SaaS product we'll see from the OpenStore team!
Disclosure: OpenStore is one of our sponsors. While the OpenDesk announcement was requested by OpenStore to be a Partner News story this week (ie: sponsored post), those news stories can occasionally overlap with news that I would otherwise cover anyway as a headline story, as it did this week. Since I wanted to add more details and commentary, I ran it as an editorial piece instead.