Impersonation: The eCommerce Support Feature

How Impersonation Can Help

Impersonation is used to help users complete various processes and allows representatives to support their customers or affiliates. Here are the beneficial ways impersonation can be used:

• Customer Service – Impersonation can be used by a customer service representative to help a user complete a step in a process that they’re stuck on. Impersonation allows the representative to view what the user is experiencing so they can know how to help them.
• Vendor Representation – A sales representative can impersonate a vendor or seller within the platform to perform tasks for them, such as bulk uploading or setting something within their store. With impersonation, these support team members can go in and represent that seller, vendor, or affiliate within that platform.
• Organizational Support – Within an organization, there can be a power user who is the primary manager of an account and multiple “lightweight” users. The lightweight users can go into the customer’s account to add items that need to be purchased, while the power user can use impersonation to support people within your customer’s organization.

What Impersonation
Can Do for You

Now we’ll take a look at the experience someone goes through with impersonation.

Once a support person is doing the impersonation, they’re now “shopping” as this other person. At the top of their screen, they’ll see an “End Session” option on all pages.

This gives them a traditional experience on the site as the user they’re impersonating with the option to end their impersonation session at any time. This way, they can see what the user is experiencing, and go to their cart or dashboard, etc., to help the user with steps in the process.

Depending on what rights we’ve given them in the admin area, this will allow the support staff member to help out with things like making changes to the cart, doing updates, or applying a discount code.

It’s possible to set this up for different roles within your organization and allow different people to have different access levels to impersonate different pieces. This can be a huge opportunity for customer support as it makes it easier to transition from self-service to interacting with a support person.