Before we get into the nuances, we’d like to give a quick nod to the team behind Re-amaze. They have built a great product that helps online businesses streamline back-end customer support. However, they seem to have not kept up with the changing landscape of buying behavior, and customer preferences and have created an enormous void their product ceases to fill.

We have migrated a good number of DTC brands who have outgrown Re: amaze, and we continuously onboard brands that evaluate Re: amaze and Richpanel and eventually choose us. We have compiled the top 5 reasons customer support leaders at fast-growing DTC brands switch to Richpanel from Re: Amaze. 

1. Your Support Team will Remain a Defensive Function

Re: Amaze as a product has solved the customer support problems purely from an internal operations standpoint and doesn’t have a strategic impetus.

We are seeing countless examples of successful E-commerce brands where the customer support and experience function act as a strategic growth lever. It is not just a back-end team that sifts through numerous tickets, day in and day out.

A good product can dictate the course of the strategy a function adopts. Re-amaze forces you to focus purely on defensive tactics such as how to make better use of agents' time and how to assign the tickets better. Etc. But if you want to overhaul your customer success function and make it a revenue driver, Re: Amaze is not a great partner in this pursuit.

Re-Amaze does a good job at centralizing your customer communication from one platform, but it ends there. There is no focus on delivering a better customer experience with a customer-facing portal, nor an emphasis on a better agent experience to resolve queries faster and with context.

Here is what a customer-facing self-service portal, a marquee capability of Richpanel will look like for the end consumer of your brand. 

2. No Focus on Pre-Purchase Customer Experience

The lines between pre-sales and post-sales are often blurred for an E-commerce business. Customers come in for your product but stay for the experience you provide. And that experience starts even before the first purchase is made.

Re-Amaze offers a chatbot and a default FAQ section as part of the customer-facing widget, but that doesn’t cut it to leave an impact on customers who probably have 10 different options to choose from.

What sets apart a great brand from an average one is how they ensure a seamless and consistent experience across every touch point in the customer journey. The really good ones use the live chat and customer widget in really off-beat ways to improve the conversion rate and deliver a delightful shopping experience.

1. Personalised product discovery flows - Use the customer portal as a personalized interactive product discovery tool and help the customer land on the right product.

2. Improve conversions by promoting products on discount - Quick coupons and discounts flow right from the self-service portal. 

3. FAQs to help select the right product - Personalized FAQ flows based on the products that they are interested in. 

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4. Multi-Lingual self-service flows - Cater to a global audience by customizing the portal to a local language based on geography. 

In case you are wondering, none of the above innovative ways of amping up your pre-purchase customer experience is possible with Re-Amaze.

3. Primitive Shopify and Magento Integration 

A customer support platform purpose-built for E-commerce should absolutely work well with your cart platform. In our opinion that should be a default. Re-Amaze ticks this box with Shopify but if you are on an enterprise platform such as Magento, an out-of-the-box integration ceases to exist.

While they let you access the order-related information for a particular customer from Shopify, the breadth of information available and the number of actions you can take on a particular order is restricting.

The possibilities are plenty with Richpanel when it comes to how you can leverage the Shopify/Magento → Richpanel bi-directional integration.

4. An Archaic Approach to Automation

It is often agreed by customers that UI is definitely not the strong suit of Re-Amaze. Agents are able to overlook that when it comes to managing conversations but it really becomes a blocker in case of setting up automation rules and macros.

It is counter-intuitive when a feature that is supposed to minimize time and effort actually draws significant time and bandwidth to even set up. On the contrary, the combination and ease of Macros and Insta Actions that Richpanel offers makes it a breeze for agents to knock off redundant scenarios.

When it comes to automation rules, the options available are limiting and only cover very basic use-cases. This is a classic example of the difference in the DNAs of the two products. While Re-Amaze builds to solve existing problems, Richpanel’s approach is to build a product that pre-empts your future requirements and lets you scale seamlessly.

With Richpanel’s automation rules, the possibilities are endless. Here are some really interesting automation rules some of our customers have set up:

1. Smart assignment rules based on product lines/ geography/lifetime value/ frequency 

2. Differentiate general comments vs support queries on Social Media

3. Auto filter spam and irrelevant

series based on the intent of the message.

4. Auto tag and create automated flows to manage warranty claims ‍

5. Sub Standard Agent Experience

Delighting customers should be a delightful experience for your agents. The learning curve of using a support solution should be as minimal as it can get. Re-Amaze doesn’t simplify the job of a customer service agent which ties back to the poor UI and UX. They offer a standard Gmail-like interface which makes it relatable but doesn’t help when you are dealing with conversations from multiple channels and sometimes multiple stores.

Here is a sneak peek of what the agent experience would be like in Richpanel.

1. Customisable views of Inbox - Segment based on brand, agent name, channel, priority, tags. Etc
2. Macros and Insta actions - Powerful shortcuts that will make the agent's job a breeze.
3. Easy collaboration - Quickly add teammates to help you out with a complex issue. We don’t charge per agent.
4. Single view of the entire customer context - One tab is all you need to stay on top of customer tickets.  

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Richpanel gets the details right. The product obsesses on usability and really makes it agent-friendly. Our UI gets the most appreciation and recognition from customers. Like we had mentioned earlier - people come in for the functionality of the product, but stay for the experience.

“ Absolutely great customer support app! I looked at a number of apps on Shopify for my customer support team and Rich Panel hands down is the best. The user interface is amazing, and the integration with my Shopify backend is seamless”

“We have tested many chat and CRM systems. Just as Shopify is the most intuitive shop system, Richpanel is the clearest and most intuitive chat and CRM system. Multiple requests can be merged, you always have an absolute overview”

“We previously used both Gorgias and Zendesk and Richpanel blows them out of the water. Not only is the interface much cleaner, but the functionality and reporting are more robust.” ‍

To summarize, Re-Amaze is built just to unify a couple of your support channels. It does the job well, but it is not a tool that will elevate your customer support operations overall. Get the edge over your competition with a platform that solves for both internal agent experience and external customer-facing experience.

When you are scaling, not only their functionality will be restricting even the pricing will be a problem. Richpanel doesn’t charge per agent. In fact, our vision is to help you scale as a lean and agile team by minimizing the number of tickets and not monetizing based on the size of the team.

Get started today, either by starting on our free trial or speaking to our team. We also offer contract buy-outs and white-gloved migration, so you don’t have to worry about the change management process and be focused on delivering best-in-class support to your customers.