When you’re running a business and want to deliver the best customer support you’re capable of, you need authentic customer support software. But deciding which tools suit your business and implementing the system is not an easy job. Therefore, we will be discussing essential Customer Service Software tools in detail.
What is Customer Service Support Software?
Customer Support Software is a tool that is used by businesses to track, manage and organize their customers’ complaints/queries, along with assisting them. Customer support software also consists of tools that help them inform and make customer service delivery easy. The main objective of the best customer support tool is to serve as a Ticketing system, where the service agents are allowed to track, manage, prioritize, respond to and resolve the queries/issues of the customers. Transforming emails, calls, and chat messages of the customers into tickets and routing them to service agents without any delay to resolve them quickly is the main objective of the ticketing system.
Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM)
Customer Service Software is integrated with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software that gives the service agents access to contextual data, like the customer’s purchase history which is stored for future references. This provides context regarding who the customer is, where they are trying to reach out from, why they’re reaching out, and other such data to the support team.
It also stores the information or data relevant to Customer Service, which can then be used to come up with valuable insights for future business. In more simple terms, Customer Support Software is a general help desk that responds to and solves customer queries regarding any product and service beyond its technical aspects.
Benefits Of Customer Service Software
Here are the 10 best benefits of Customer Service Software.
- Deliver 24/7 Support: Many customer support software solutions allow the customers to send their queries/complaints as emails even outside of working hours. These emails are automatically transformed into tickets and routed to the first available service agent during office hours. In this way, you can provide all-day, year-long access to your customers
- Never Miss A Ticket: Customer Service Software tracks ticket statuses, automates ticket routing and alerts service agents about pending tickets. Since the tickets are referenced to previous conversations, the service agents can quickly take over any of them without repeating the process from the beginning. Hence, you can avoid scenarios like missing customers’ complaints, disappointing them, and losing their business.
- Automate Processes: Customer Support Software helps in saving your service agents’ time for other important tasks. It automates time-consuming repetitive processes like ticketing, ticket routing, queuing, routine reporting, and other administrative tasks.
- Enhance Agent Training: Customer Support Software helps you gain a clear picture of how your service agents are performing, not only on a per-case basis but also over a while, and you will easily know if your customer service is improving or degrading. These insights help you plot new strategies to keep up your customer service and training the agents.
- Provide The Right Service: In case your business involves Service Level Agreements (SLAs), not every customer is equal. Once they register with you, SLAs are the level of support that you promised and the customers expect. CSS systems automatically route premium SLA tickets to the right agents. It saves time and serves right by eliminating time-consuming ticket sorting tasks.
- Build A Knowledge Base: The resolved tickets can be used to build the FAQ portal, which acts as your knowledge base. The more unique cases, the more efficient your FAQ portal will be. Recurring issues can be routed to the FAQ portal and repetitive workload for your service agents can be eliminated.
- Solicit References: Customer Service Software captures a customer’s positive feedback. A recorded call or traced email, with permission, can be used as a product reference/recommendation for your business site.
- Gain Customer Insights: As you collect tickets, issues, resolutions, and support interactions, your customer database will be a good insight into your business. Running key metrics using analytics allows you to discover patterns and trends of issues. In the long run, you can have a better view of sensitive points of your products and services, helping you improve the quality of customer service.
- Gives Businesses The Ability To Scale Brighter: Customer Support Software allows a business to gain the power of customer-centric dexterity. In simple words, it helps the business grow and scale based on its customers’ needs.
- Enables Smaller Teams To Be Faster And Effective: The time taken for the first reply/response is one of the key factors to measure customer satisfaction. Customer Service Software helps the service agents of small teams in responding and resolving the customers’ issues quickly, between many service channels. So, even small support teams can handle many issues.
How Does Customer Service Software Help Small Businesses?
Whether you’re starting a small business or a start-up, Customer Support Software can add value to your services. A small general help desk can greatly help growing businesses that want to organize, prioritize, consolidate, and resolve customer queries/complaints. When implemented well, the software allows reliable, quicker, and more personalized solutions to provide assistance and advice to the customers. Thus, even small businesses can set themselves apart with superior customer service.
Small customer support teams can be empowered to keep customers informed and satisfied with the customer service tools for small businesses.
- Track And Improve With Ease: Resource management and customer support are equally important. Customer Service Software allows you to monitor your agent’s efforts, efficiency, and other metrics. Access to valuable data like these can help identify areas for improvement of team productivity and service quality.
- Effortless Collaboration: In some cases, your service agents have to work with other teams to resolve the issues faced by the customers. Collaborative features allow for a good customer support system and help agents communicate fluently with each other. Your team can be free of limitations and work with streamlined interactions.
- Powerful Automation: The manual processing of tickets can be tiring and they may go unnoticed through the crack slippages. Customer Support Software’s effective automation takes care that your tickets find the right agent right away, and also takes care of all the routine tasks of the small businesses.
Best tools For Customer Service Support
Businesses need different Customer Service Software solutions at different stages of their services. There are many tools to improve customer service which include free customer service tools and also customer support apps.
Here Are The Best Customer Service Tools/Apps:-
Zendesk: It empowers businesses to build effortless customer experiences. It is helpful in both communication management and the creation of Stackify documentation through Zendesk’s help center. With this, conversions flow seamlessly across channels, leading to greater productivity of the support team and satisfaction of customers.
Features:-
- API
- Tracking and reporting
- Community forums
- Automation
- Knowledge base
- Ticket routing
- Native integrations
- Self-service portal
JIRA: Jira’s Customer Support tool can be used to integrate all the works you need to accomplish. It also enables you to report bugs, improvements and feature requests raised by the customers. Jira boards help you in prioritizing the tickets, like which issues are critical and deserve more attention. With the integration of tools like Jira – Zendesk, processes like attaching tickets to a work item and routing it to a developer are made easy. This is very useful when it is necessary to track a ticket from the moment it is created to the time it is resolved.
Slack: Using Slack, service agents can communicate better with each other when processing or solving tickets for more effective collaboration, faster if it is integrated with a customer service Software solution. Slack is a great 24/7 customer support tool that greatly improves communication between the support teams. With Slack, you can easily get together through different channels set up for different purposes. It also allows the internal customers to get seamless support from the IT and HR departments from the same channel which they use for teammates’ communication. It allows you to watch over production-related issues far before they are reported.
Features:-
- Native integrations
- Messaging
- Community forums
- Surveys
- Video conferencing
- API
- Live chat
Seagence: Maintaining API and Web Services are one of the biggest tasks for the developers. Seagence is one of the best Defect Monitoring solutions for java that helps enterprises and IT operation teams in monitoring their production software applications. It uncovers all production defects with the root causes in real-time and reduces MTTR. whenever defects occur, you will get an alert directly to your inbox. It’s pretty awesome. You should check it out today – maybe Seagence can solve an issue you’ve been having!
Features:-
- Realtime defect identification
- Automated root cause
- Realtime Alerts
- Records all thrown exceptions
- Steps to reproduce
- Graphical Dashboard
Recurly: This tool provides a platform for versatile Subscription billing Management. With this, you can manage the entire subscriber lifecycle. Agents need not to switch between the tabs to change the customer subscription details if recurly is integrated with Zendesk. Recurly also gives your agents the ability to manage subscriptions, offer discount codes, set up recurring payments, etc.
Features:-
- API
- Self-service portal
- Automation
- Subscription management
- Multiple payment options
- Native integrations
Sprout Social: The adoption of social media for communication is constantly growing nowadays. Customer support services that deliver cohesive social support experiences are also growing in value. Sprout Social helps in facilitating conversations across all the social networking channels. By connecting social media teams and service agents, Sprout Social can eliminate the disconnected communications and work patterns.
Features:-
- Social media monitoring/management
- Automation
- Tracking and reporting
- Customer segmentation
- Post scheduling
- Reporting and analytics
Apple Business Chat: With this Solution, the customers can get replies for their queries, get their issues resolved, schedule appointments, and make purchases. A business will need a messaging partner like Sunshine conversations to have a consistent and seamless conversational experience over Apple Business Chats like custom messaging channels.
Features:-
- Payments
- Native integrations
- Image/audio/video file support
- API
- Booking
Conclusion
Customer satisfaction will continue to be the key factor for the direct growth of any business. Thus, you need to be equipped with the necessary tools and solutions to provide a better customer experience and customer support for any issues that arise. In this ever-growing technology scenario, holding on to customers and retaining them as frequent users can lead your organization to consistent success.
We, at Seagence, help software developers and enterprises with production and defect monitoring solutions that uncover all defects with the root cause in real-time. Feel free to contact us for your inquiries. Signup with us. Our experts will be in touch within 24 hours and assist you with the best guidance.