Customer service software is the backbone of a great customer experience. But understanding which tools are right for your business, vetting vendors, and implementing systems is a challenging task.
To help you with this, we'll start with the basics of customer support software: what it is, the different types, and how it can benefit your team. Then we'll cover best practices, the latest trends, and an overview of the best available tools.
To help you with this, we'll start with the basics of customer support software: what it is, the different types, and how it can benefit your team. Then we'll cover best practices, the latest trends, and an overview of the best available tools.
Finally, we'll cover how to consider choosing the ideal customer support software for your organization.
Building a thriving support team and department from 0 is easy.
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What is Customer Service Software?
Kustomer service software is any program that helps an organization provide help and advice to people who buy or use its products.
The most basic role of customer service software is to provide a centralized system, called a ticketing system, in which service agents can track, prioritize, manage, respond to and resolve customer inquiries or employee requests. Customer service software also includes any tools that help inform or facilitate customer service delivery.
This includes tools such as knowledge bases, messaging applications, analytics dashboards, and more.
How does customer service software work?
At the most basic level, customer service software enables organizations to improve customer service delivery by unifying customer conversations and information across channels and systems in one location.
Why do small businesses need customer support software?
Small businesses need customer support software to help organize, prioritize and integrate customer service queries. When appropriately used, customer service software can respond to customer queries faster, more reliably, and with greater personalization. This helps small businesses stand out with superior customer service.
When do you need customer service software?
Investing in customer service software is like hiring another pair of hands. You can hire more staff when you need help managing your company's workload, and you can use CS software when you need to expand your customer service offerings. Once your customer base grows to the point where you can't keep up - or worse, you're making costly mistakes - it's time to bring in software to help.
Different types of customer service software
- Live Chat
- Phone support
- Email
- Knowledge Base
- Messages
- Video Chat
- Mobile Text Messaging
Customer service can be internal - supporting employees within a company - or external - helping the people who buy or use its products or services.
Each customer service channel is often considered a different type of customer service. Here are the main types of customer service you should know about.
Live Chat
Live chat software enables agents to resolve customer issues in real-time from where they are already located, such as on the home page of your website or inside a mobile application.
This allows companies to be proactive and stay ahead of issues before they occur or even happen. For example, an e-commerce company might offer live chat on its checkout page to answer common questions before customers abandon their shopping carts.
Live chat also enables companies to provide support around the clock. While your agents are busy being human, chatbots can handle customer requests for them.
Phone Support
Phone conversations are still an effective way to resolve customer issues, especially for high-stakes issues. It's sometimes even more effective than lengthy email conversations or live chats, thanks to the personal touch that comes with a phone call that sounds like a human voice.
With features such as call recording, intelligent internal routing, access to complete customer histories, and automatic work order creation, call center software makes customer service representatives more strategic.
Email
Email is the foundation of customer support. Like the telephone, it is deeply rooted and remains the channel of choice for the older generation.
An email is often a form of internal support as well as a form of external support. For example, HR, payroll, or IT teams can use email to answer questions from full-time and part-time employees.
Knowledge Base
Through knowledge bases, community forums, or customer portals, support teams can enable customers to help themselves. 81% of customers prefer to solve problems themselves.
But this is only possible if the support team has the tools to make knowledge creation and maintenance easy. For example, AI can flag content as it becomes outdated or when new article topics are needed. It can also use the collective knowledge of agents to resolve low-touch tickets automatically.
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Why not use AI chatbots
Messaging apps
The proliferation of messaging channels such as WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, and Facebook Messenger has changed how people connect.
This convenience factor also affects customer service. Customer service software applications allow customers to get in touch through the same messaging channels they use to communicate with friends and family.
The benefit of using customer service software to communicate through messaging channels is the ability to keep conversations and context in one centralized location. If resolving a customer issue starts with a single message and requires a follow-up call, that information is recorded in the same support ticket.
Video Chat
With the pandemic and the proliferation of apps like Zoom and Google Meet turning video chat into a preferred business connection tool, it's no wonder that video chat is also becoming a new and popular customer service channel. Especially for SaaS companies, features such as screen sharing and co-browsing provide clarity on customer issues and give CS reps insight into technical issues.
Mobile Messaging
While not suitable for all companies, mobile messaging assistance can provide quick and practical support for minor issues. Especially for issues that require a large number of yes or no questions, mobile messaging can be an easy way to gather information and automatically generate a solution via a bot.
Most mobile messaging customer support is used for product tracking, activation, and appointment confirmation.
What are the key benefits of customer service tools?
Customer service platforms can benefit companies of all sizes and types - from multinational enterprises that support millions of other businesses in multiple languages to small consumer-facing businesses that need to answer customer questions quickly without having to hire a large number of support representatives.
The following are some of the key benefits of customer service tools.
Best Knowledge Base Software Find the best one for you among 10 solutions | Bclinked
Why not use AI chatbots
1. Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty
Service agents can provide better service with the information and tools they need to deliver fast, personalized customer responses. With better service, your customers are less likely to churn and more likely to become loyal buyers.
Since 52% of customers deliberately buy from the brands, they are loyal to. Higher loyalty usually means more sales. In this way, by facilitating improved service, customer service software can help your business grow and gain more satisfied, loyal customers.
2. Simplify self-service
63% of customers always or almost always start by searching a company's online resources when they have a problem. The challenge for businesses is to manage a system that creates and updates these resources in real-time.
Customer service platforms enable your organization to streamline the creation and management of knowledge bases, saving agent time and providing customers with the necessary resources. In addition, you can track how customers use your knowledge base to help further improve self-service.
3. Facilitate a seamless agent experience
Customer service tools help agents access and use the customer information they need anytime, anywhere. These tools also help improve internal collaboration through shared inboxes and increase efficiency through streamlined workflows. The result is agents who are better prepared and more motivated to provide better customer service. All of this leads to higher productivity, which saves business time and resources.
4. Enables businesses to scale smarter
To some extent, essential tools such as spreadsheets are not enough to facilitate transparent internal and external customer service communication. However, without adequate collaboration between your service teams, it is almost impossible to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction as your business grows.
Customer service applications give companies the agility to be customer-centric. In other words, they enable companies to grow and develop in response to customer needs.
5. Enable smaller teams to get more done faster
The speed of the "first response" is one of the most significant factors affecting customer satisfaction. But with so many service channels and growing personalized needs, service agents need customer service applications to help them respond and resolve issues faster.
The data supports this: The top-performing service teams have almost twice the ticket-to-agent ratio of other companies. The way they perform well with fewer agents is by using customer service software that allows each agent to do more.
What are the best practices for customer support software?
Customer support software promises exciting features, but those promises can be dashed if the people using the software don't follow best practices. Here are four best practices to help your team exceed expectations.
Meet customers on their terms
Customers don't care about terms like omnichannel.
The experience that omnichannel customer service can provide is a huge differentiator and a vital tool for fostering loyalty. Omnichannel means providing all the channels your customers expect to communicate with your company - email, chat, phone, text, and social media.
This creates trust and comfort for customers because they can communicate with you as if talking to friends and family.
Make personalization possible
The information needed to understand what your customers want from your products and services may be available to you and already flooding in. This data can provide insights into when, where, and how to engage customers for engagement strategies.
It works: Zendesk's findings show that companies that leverage the most data resolve 36% faster and reduce wait times by 79% while resolving four times as many customer requests.
If you need help figuring out where to start, the best first step is to use the cloud's lightweight help desk. Reduced learning costs and rapid deployment are undoubtedly high.
Invest in effective collaboration
There's a reason why telecom giants, banks, and airlines top this list of companies with the worst customer service ratings. Large companies are complex, and when there are thousands of employees, it's much harder to find the right people to talk to - for both agents and customers.
That's why it's so important to provide your team with an easy way to connect with other departments so you can streamline communication and internal workflows, giving agents the context they need to provide more responsive support when they need it.
Integrating Customer Service and Customer Success
Traditional customer service is reactive. Customers have a problem, they contact an organization, and they are routed to an agent or resource that can help them resolve the issue. But the world's fastest-growing companies are being more proactive in providing customer service.
Instead of reacting, these organizations adapt their services to ensure their customers achieve their goals.
Some companies are even creating dedicated customer success teams to complement (or replace) their service teams. While traditional customer service is far from obsolete, it is clear that executives, managers, and agents are rethinking how they define customer service.
Associations
Live chat knowledge base Support : Definition, Benefits, and Best Practices
How can help desk software help you improve your ROI | Bclinked
Six business delemmas | After-sales service can help you.
User support was supposed to be so easy | BClinked
with Self-service and a perfect Ticketing System.
What is Customer Service Software?
Kustomer service software is any program that helps an organization provide help and advice to people who buy or use its products.
The most basic role of customer service software is to provide a centralized system, called a ticketing system, in which service agents can track, prioritize, manage, respond to and resolve customer inquiries or employee requests. Customer service software also includes any tools that help inform or facilitate customer service delivery.
This includes tools such as knowledge bases, messaging applications, analytics dashboards, and more.
How does customer service software work?
At the most basic level, customer service software enables organizations to improve customer service delivery by unifying customer conversations and information across channels and systems in one location.
Why do small businesses need customer support software?
Small businesses need customer support software to help organize, prioritize and integrate customer service queries. When appropriately used, customer service software can respond to customer queries faster, more reliably, and with greater personalization. This helps small businesses stand out with superior customer service.
When do you need customer service software?
Investing in customer service software is like hiring another pair of hands. You can hire more staff when you need help managing your company's workload, and you can use CS software when you need to expand your customer service offerings. Once your customer base grows to the point where you can't keep up - or worse, you're making costly mistakes - it's time to bring in software to help.
Different types of customer service software
- Live Chat
- Phone support
- Knowledge Base
- Messages
- Video Chat
- Mobile Text Messaging
Customer service can be internal - supporting employees within a company - or external - helping the people who buy or use its products or services.
Each customer service channel is often considered a different type of customer service. Here are the main types of customer service you should know about.
Please remember to select at most 3 support channels. Opening many tracks at the beginning can be detrimental to your business when you are forced to close channels due to a lack of staff.
On the contrary, if you gradually open more and more channels according to the demand, users will have a favourable opinion of your company.
Live Chat
Live chat software enables agents to resolve customer issues in real-time from where they are already located, such as on the home page of your website or inside a mobile application.
This allows companies to be proactive and stay ahead of issues before they occur or even happen. For example, an e-commerce company might offer live chat on its checkout page to answer common questions before customers abandon their shopping carts.
Live chat also enables companies to provide support around the clock. While your agents are busy being human, chatbots can handle customer requests for them.
Phone Support
Phone conversations are still an effective way to resolve customer issues, especially for high-stakes issues. It's sometimes even more effective than lengthy email conversations or live chats, thanks to the personal touch that comes with a phone call that sounds like a human voice.
With features such as call recording, intelligent internal routing, access to complete customer histories, and automatic work order creation, call center software makes customer service representatives more strategic.
Email is the foundation of customer support. Like the telephone, it is deeply rooted and remains the channel of choice for the older generation.
An email is often a form of internal support as well as a form of external support. For example, HR, payroll, or IT teams can use email to answer questions from full-time and part-time employees.
Knowledge Base
Through knowledge bases, community forums, or customer portals, support teams can enable customers to help themselves. 81% of customers prefer to solve problems themselves.
But this is only possible if the support team has the tools to make knowledge creation and maintenance easy. For example, AI can flag content as it becomes outdated or when new article topics are needed. It can also use the collective knowledge of agents to resolve low-touch tickets automatically.
Typically, the return on investment for building a support library is highest if your knowledge base can properly guide users to the answers.
Related Posts：
Best Knowledge Base Software Find the best one for you among 10 solutions | Bclinked
Why not use AI chatbots
Messaging apps
The proliferation of messaging channels such as WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, and Facebook Messenger has changed how people connect.
This convenience factor also affects customer service. Customer service software applications allow customers to get in touch through the same messaging channels they use to communicate with friends and family.
The benefit of using customer service software to communicate through messaging channels is the ability to keep conversations and context in one centralized location. If resolving a customer issue starts with a single message and requires a follow-up call, that information is recorded in the same support ticket.
Web chat is essential. When your customers have questions, it can satisfy them in the first place.
Video Chat
With the pandemic and the proliferation of apps like Zoom and Google Meet turning video chat into a preferred business connection tool, it's no wonder that video chat is also becoming a new and popular customer service channel. Especially for SaaS companies, features such as screen sharing and co-browsing provide clarity on customer issues and give CS reps insight into technical issues.
There are too many free software alternatives to video chat. There may be better options than paying for video chat for most companies.
Mobile Messaging
While not suitable for all companies, mobile messaging assistance can provide quick and practical support for minor issues. Especially for issues that require a large number of yes or no questions, mobile messaging can be an easy way to gather information and automatically generate a solution via a bot.
Most mobile messaging customer support is used for product tracking, activation, and appointment confirmation.
What are the key benefits of customer service tools?
Customer service platforms can benefit companies of all sizes and types - from multinational enterprises that support millions of other businesses in multiple languages to small consumer-facing businesses that need to answer customer questions quickly without having to hire a large number of support representatives.
The following are some of the key benefits of customer service tools.
Related Posts：
Best Knowledge Base Software Find the best one for you among 10 solutions | Bclinked
Why not use AI chatbots
1. Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty
Service agents can provide better service with the information and tools they need to deliver fast, personalized customer responses. With better service, your customers are less likely to churn and more likely to become loyal buyers.
Since 52% of customers deliberately buy from the brands, they are loyal to. Higher loyalty usually means more sales. In this way, by facilitating improved service, customer service software can help your business grow and gain more satisfied, loyal customers.
2. Simplify self-service
63% of customers always or almost always start by searching a company's online resources when they have a problem. The challenge for businesses is to manage a system that creates and updates these resources in real-time.
Customer service platforms enable your organization to streamline the creation and management of knowledge bases, saving agent time and providing customers with the necessary resources. In addition, you can track how customers use your knowledge base to help further improve self-service.
3. Facilitate a seamless agent experience
Customer service tools help agents access and use the customer information they need anytime, anywhere. These tools also help improve internal collaboration through shared inboxes and increase efficiency through streamlined workflows. The result is agents who are better prepared and more motivated to provide better customer service. All of this leads to higher productivity, which saves business time and resources.
4. Enables businesses to scale smarter
To some extent, essential tools such as spreadsheets are not enough to facilitate transparent internal and external customer service communication. However, without adequate collaboration between your service teams, it is almost impossible to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction as your business grows.
Customer service applications give companies the agility to be customer-centric. In other words, they enable companies to grow and develop in response to customer needs.
5. Enable smaller teams to get more done faster
The speed of the "first response" is one of the most significant factors affecting customer satisfaction. But with so many service channels and growing personalized needs, service agents need customer service applications to help them respond and resolve issues faster.
The data supports this: The top-performing service teams have almost twice the ticket-to-agent ratio of other companies. The way they perform well with fewer agents is by using customer service software that allows each agent to do more.
What are the best practices for customer support software?
Customer support software promises exciting features, but those promises can be dashed if the people using the software don't follow best practices. Here are four best practices to help your team exceed expectations.
Meet customers on their terms
Customers don't care about terms like omnichannel.
The experience that omnichannel customer service can provide is a huge differentiator and a vital tool for fostering loyalty. Omnichannel means providing all the channels your customers expect to communicate with your company - email, chat, phone, text, and social media.
This creates trust and comfort for customers because they can communicate with you as if talking to friends and family.
Make personalization possible
The information needed to understand what your customers want from your products and services may be available to you and already flooding in. This data can provide insights into when, where, and how to engage customers for engagement strategies.
It works: Zendesk's findings show that companies that leverage the most data resolve 36% faster and reduce wait times by 79% while resolving four times as many customer requests.
If you need help figuring out where to start, the best first step is to use the cloud's lightweight help desk. Reduced learning costs and rapid deployment are undoubtedly high.
Invest in effective collaboration
There's a reason why telecom giants, banks, and airlines top this list of companies with the worst customer service ratings. Large companies are complex, and when there are thousands of employees, it's much harder to find the right people to talk to - for both agents and customers.
That's why it's so important to provide your team with an easy way to connect with other departments so you can streamline communication and internal workflows, giving agents the context they need to provide more responsive support when they need it.
Integrating Customer Service and Customer Success
Traditional customer service is reactive. Customers have a problem, they contact an organization, and they are routed to an agent or resource that can help them resolve the issue. But the world's fastest-growing companies are being more proactive in providing customer service.
Instead of reacting, these organizations adapt their services to ensure their customers achieve their goals.
Some companies are even creating dedicated customer success teams to complement (or replace) their service teams. While traditional customer service is far from obsolete, it is clear that executives, managers, and agents are rethinking how they define customer service.
User support was supposed to be so easy | BClinked
with Self-service and a perfect Ticketing System.