Best Customer Support Software for Your Business

What is Customer Support Software?

Customer support software is a type of ticketing system that helps in documentation, process tracking, and customer queries resolution. An online customer support system can collate customer requests from multiple channels (including phone, live chat, email, and social media) into a single portal and then agents can quickly address queries. 

Using this software, agents can seamlessly work on each ticket; consequently, different departments can easily collaborate on meeting customer needs. The tool can help generate detailed reports and insights into customer interactions so that organizations can assess the quality of their customer service.

Why is Customer Support Software Important for Every Business?

Best customer support solution helps businesses manage and maintain a strong relationship with their customers. The benefits of this solution are mentioned here:

1. Collecting customer queries across multiple channels

Customer service support software helps businesses collate customer queries from multiple platforms into a single place. Whether the customer is calling on the helpline number, shooting an email to the support team, or commenting on your social media page, the tool can seamlessly generate a ticket for each customer query, which automatically gets added to the centralized stream. This ensures no query goes unaddressed by the agents.

2. Increasing customer satisfaction by delivering faster issue resolution

You can prioritize tickets using this software as well as organize the ticket resolution workflow to collaborate on tickets effectively. This process can help shorten the resolution cycle along with improving customer satisfaction levels.

3. Getting insights into team performance

Customer support software provides analytical capabilities to its users in the form of customizable reports and dashboards to gain deep insights into the support team’s performance metrics. The tool helps you find out the amount of time your team takes to respond, how busy agents get on certain days of the week and enlist the frequently asked questions. With this information, you can manage agents and increase productivity by improving their response time.

4. Reduce the time that agents spend on each ticket

Customer service reps can easily tag members of other teams, forward tickets to the correct department, and direct the customer to the best resource. Quickly editable templates, the ability to simultaneously respond to multiple queries, and standardized answers can help shorten ticket resolution time.

What are the Different Types of Customer Support Platforms?

Here are some popular types of online customer support software:

1. Self-serve Customer Service

Companies need to build solutions that are fully unlinked from customer support reps. Such solutions can help customers and leads get information on their own without having to contact anyone. This is great for people who take out some time and conduct research on their own instead of going on a live chat with a customer support rep.

Also, if the person raising a query knows how to operate with this specific type of service or software, then looking for viable information on their own will be the best solution. Businesses should include some sort of self-serve customer service software solution. And once this type of service is published, you can simply forget about the thing. There will be a need to update the resource frequently, but unless you make changes to your offer, it will work great on its own.

2. Live Chat Support

Customers want to get their issues resolved quickly, so the best option they have is to connect with an expert who can provide a comprehensive solution and guide them through the steps. A great way to provide direct customer service is by implementing live chat on your top customer support software. The most significant advantage of live chat is the speed.

Your customers and leads will get a response in just a few minutes, ensuring they get a seamless experience and hence continue using your product/service. In the case of leads, this can ensure they are tempted to buy your services. No customer wishes to spend too much time looking for an answer, and they want to get any issue resolved instantly. Live chat serves both these purposes.

3. Social Media Support

With over 2.38 billion monthly active Facebook users, it’s hard to keep social media out of this list. What’s more, Facebook lets its users post business reviews, which is why you must utilize this channel. While using social media, promptness is of utmost importance. One must constantly monitor all the available channels because that’s exactly where an unsatisfied or angry customer might share or vent out his troubles around your product or service. This will lead to negative publicity in the market. If this happens, you have to act instantly.

You can have a person on your customer support team dedicatedly work on resolving social media queries. You can also use proper social media monitoring software that notifies you whenever someone mentions your product or brand.

4. Email Support

Although emails are pretty old-schooled, they remain a viable way to provide top-notch customer service. With an email customer support system, you’ll need a person or a team to answer queries raised by your customers and leads. To let people contact you about your business, you have to ensure your email address is clearly visible on your website. Typically, companies put their contact details on a dedicated contact webpage and the website’s footer.

Using email support, people can contact your customer support team without directly interacting with another human. An email is a great way to explain complex issues by writing down the overview of your matter in depth.

5. Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

IVR is an automated telephony system to interact with the callers via the keypad, dial pad, or voice requests. While IVR may seem futile, a well-organized IVR can help your customers greatly. Remember, not every customer service rep is knowledgeable enough to answer all the customer queries. But in a standard way, the telephonic system can seamlessly distribute all of the calls equally by taking into account whether a particular rep may be able to take a call at that time or not.

Unfortunately, such a system can cause problems when there’s a high volume of incoming calls. A caller then has to be redirected or put on hold. To limit the number of times, you redirect callers or put them on hold, just implement an IVR to sort callers as per their issues.

What are the Top Features of Customer Support Software?

An online customer support tool offers the following top features:

1. Knowledge base

It helps you build and manage a centralized, searchable repository of information that maintains frequent and previously asked queries and responses.

2. Support ticketing

You can also track interactions and auto-generate tickets effectively for service requests and customer queries.

3. Multichannel communication

The tool helps you manage incoming and outgoing customer communication on multiple channels, including phone, live chat, social media, and email.

4. Queue management

You can monitor the wait time for incoming requests that are yet to be routed and manage the ticket queue efficiently.

5. Live chat

You can seamlessly chat with customers and resolve their queries in real-time using this software.

6. Appointment management

Online customer support software also allows you to schedule and manage interactions with customers.

Factors To Consider While Implementing Customer Support Software?

The key factors to consider on priority while implementing the customer support software are:

1. Defining your business requirements:

Before starting to implement the customer support system, it is crucial for all business to clear their requirements and expectations from the software. It helps in best optimization and eliminates the chances of under-working over over-burdened customer service systems.

2. Location of the servers:

Companies can choose from the two options of on-premise or cloud-based customer support solutions. Cloud-based technology is ideal for budding businesses, while the on-premise software works well for the businesses captivating sensitive data like banking, healthcare, etc.

3. Ease to use:

Any customer support software should bring in an intuitive platform that is easy to use for the customers. The customer support team should also feel adaptable to this newly implemented software.

4. Customization features:

Each business is different and aims to customize its products and services to serve customers better. Thus, any leading customer support software should offer multiple customization features for optimized implementation.

5. Flexibility:

While implementing any leading customer support system, businesses should take care that it should offer flexibility in operations. Teams should be able to access the system from remote locations without any difficulties.

6. Scalability:

Budding businesses should always implement customer support solutions that are highly scalable and offers a wide growth bracket. It becomes one of the crucial features for startups, small and medium enterprises.

Upcoming Trends in Customer Support Software

Customer support software has promising trends in the future with the following as the best upcoming trends in this highly functional software:

1. Real-time assistance with co-browsing:

Real-time support is a much-valued concept in customer service. The future customer support tools should be equipping real-time assistance with co-browsing to help agents serve the customers in the best possible way.

2. Introducing machine learning in automation:

Businesses should step ahead of cloud technology and move to the artificial intelligence-based Chatbot. These AI Chatbots will help customers get the best self-help services.

3. Personalized customer care:

Every customer wants to feel special, and it can be accomplished by providing them with the best-personalized customer care. It will help businesses engage customers, learn their interests, and increase brand loyalty.

4. Mobile-friendly services:

Customer support software should introduce mobile-friendly services as several customers access the website and online services through smartphones only. Keeping mobile as the center of customer services is highly beneficial for many companies.

What Should You Look for While Purchasing Online Customer Support Tools?

1. Decide what your requirements are

Take your time to analyze the current support processes carefully, and ask yourself the following questions: 

• How long has the software company been in the business? If they have been around for a longer time, they are credible. 

• What's their software's uptime?

• Enlist all the areas you want to apply automation to for cutting down redundancies.

• Check your customer contact points (such as email, forums, phone numbers, etc.) and try adding a few more options to make your business accessible to audiences.

Help desk software solutions offer several features, but you'll have to do your research and select the best suitable one.

2. Figure out your budget

Whenever you're ready to purchase a customer support system, choose a sustainable application that allows you to scale. Best customer support software does not always have to be expensive. As per your needs, your company may even work well with an open-source solution. Take a look at this checklist before taking the plunge:

• Once the size of your team has been decided, pick the plan that offers the maximum number of features you need at a low cost (per person). If you have a small team, find a plan that can seamlessly accommodate future hiring.

• Carefully analyze your business and then decide how important your support team is to your system. Then, exercise caution while allocating a budget for help desk tools.

• Check whether the software you’ve chosen works well with the other applications that your team uses in your company.?

3. Always get a free trial

Most customer support software often advertises robust ticket management features. But it's important to understand that some systems may provide a better ticket management solution than others. Weigh the capabilities offered and match them with your requirements like this:

• You can start by defining the scope of the service you want to provide.

• Next, calculate its cost.

• Take a free trial of the product to check if it is the right fit for your company.

• Take full access to product education materials and try to explore all the functionalities as well as you can.

4. Measure the impact of your help desk

Once you've thoroughly assessed everything, purchased the best customer support software, and put it to use, you've to measure how it has helped enhance your customer service. By doing this, you can tell whether the software served its purpose effectively or not.

The following parameters can help you determine the impact of your help desk software:

• Pay close attention to the customer feedback

• Keep an eye out for the average duration of customer interactions and the average agent response time.

• Note down the ticket resolution time and average first response time.

• Have records of the number of overdue tickets before and after implementing the customer support system.

• Keep close track of escalated issues and the number of open tickets.

Top Issues With Customer Support Software?

The top and main issues with customer support software include:

1. Handling the Silo-effect:

During call transfer from one agent to the other, customers have to repeat the same situation or issue to more than one person that makes them furious. This is called the “silo-effect” and occurs due to the weak integration between different communication channels and customer data banks.

Solution: This “silo-effect” is a great hindrance to effective communications with different customers. Companies can switch to the customer support tool that gives a full context of the customer interaction history quickly and in a single-window only.

2. Prioritizing the ticket resolution:

Every customer expects priority in getting their issues resolved. However, managing different customers may become difficult for the customer agents. This delay in resolving the problems of the customers may cost the business thousands of dollars.

Solution: Companies can go for the customer support systems that work on automatically prioritizing the urgent tickets. It further automatically assigns tickets to different agents.

3. Managing different customer support channels:

Whether it is online messaging, emails, or calls, managing different issues or inquiries of the customers coming from different channels is one of the main issues in customer support solutions. This makes the entire process overloading for the customer service agents.

Solution: Businesses can switch to the omnichannel customer support software that makes it super easy for their customer support team to handle the different communication channels under one roof.

4. Handover from Chatbot to agent:

Many businesses go for Chatbot that offers self-service features to the customers. The issues with the Chatbot, like the limited resolution to the main problems, lack of intelligence-based thinking, etc., make it necessary to involve human intervention.

Solution: Always go for the customer support software that comes with the seamless handover from Chatbot to different agents. Thus, the live agent can carry forward the context-driven conversation from the Chatbot.

5. Assigning right customer support:

Transferring the calls from one team to another or from one agent to the second agent is frustrating for any customer. This decreases the resolution time and hampers the customer satisfaction levels.

Solution: Businesses can go for the customer support system that offers dynamic routing. These features assign the different issues of the customers to the right customer support agent.

What are the Latest Trends in a Customer Support Tool?

1. The ‘M’ factor

Smartphones are growing more powerful every day, with an increased percentage of ownership. As per the research conducted by Outerboxdesign, about 80% of shoppers use mobile phones in a physical store to compare prices, find other store locations, or check product reviews.

Providing customer service through mobile is vital for any company aspiring to keep up with the market changes so, select the best customer support system that can flex with a mobile version.

Here are a few interesting stats on the ‘M’ factor:

• Around 1.2 billion people access the web from mobile devices daily.
• At least 58% of all US consumers own a smartphone.
• Not using a mobile-optimized website is like keeping your store closed once a week!

2. Customers will contact you on social media

Social media is a great way to connect with customers. Every online store has to have a social media presence. 

According to a study published in ValueWalk, about 63% of customers want companies to offer support through social media, while 35% of customers prefer to support through other channels.

These numbers are set to rise further, so it’s time for you to get onboard. You can extend your customer service support via Facebook and Twitter or using other social media platforms. Just consider other solutions that require special custom integrations.

Take a look at these stats on customer service in social media:

• By implementing a social customer support system, companies can increase annual customer satisfaction scores by about 20%.
• Companies that have improved customer experience on social media channels have seen a 30-50% improvement in key measures, including chances of repeat purchases, upsell, and product recommendations to others.
• A single social customer service interaction costs about $1, and a single call center interaction costs about $6.
• 33% of users even prefer to contact brands on social media instead of calling up.
• By engaging in customer service requests on social channels, companies can bring 20-40% more revenue per customer.

3. Using AI (artificial intelligence) and chatbots to replace manual queries

“In the long run, I think we will evolve in computing from a mobile-first to an AI-first world.” – Sundar Pichai, CEO at Google Inc. 

Self-service tools have become the new customer support software trend. Here are the reasons why we are emphasizing self-service tools:

• Business needs are constantly changing
• IT systems are unable to meet business user demand 
• Slow or untimely access to information 
• Users are dissatisfied with IT BI capabilities
• The current environment is very complex for use 
• Lack of IT BI/DW skills

As per the BI Survey 13 published by BARC, only about 15% of employees use business intelligence in places where it’s available.

Misconceptions around business intelligence tools being difficult to use, expensive, and failing to deliver real business value are creating this situation. 

But in ruth, AI bots like Acquire Chatbots or MobileMonkey can help you create valuable data and simultaneously provide real-time customer service.

4. Machine learning to change the customer experience

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology- not the other way around.” – Steve Jobs 

Machine learning is a type of data analysis technique that can automate analytical model-building algorithms to discover data iteratively. ML allows computers to discover items without being programmed about where to look.

Since models are exposed to new data, they can independently adapt to the changing business environments. They can refer to previous computations for producing reliable, repeatable decisions and results.

Advantages of machine learning include:

• Smart customer support software service chatbots
• Market-adjusted pricing
• Fraud detection and prevention
• Improved product search
• Improved on-site merchandising
• Improved business decision-making

5. Customer service reps can work from home

“A brand is defined by the customer’s experience. The experience is delivered by the employees.” – Shep Hyken

In the present COVID-19 era, companies are witnessing remarkable growth in their freelance and remote workforce. Customer service jobs can easily be performed from home. With this freedom, companies can easily find and retain talent for these roles that can work in coordination with customer support management systems efficiently.

The real estate cost alone would be tremendous to hire new customer service reps in NYC or San Francisco. Now is the perfect time to list your help desk job as a remote opportunity.

Top 5 Customer Support Software to Look Out For

The top and best five customer support software to look out for are:

1. Freshworks CRM:

Freshworks CRM is a sales customer support system that brings the next-generation customer engagement platform to different companies. It is powered by artificial intelligence and is widely accepted by sales and marketing professionals across different service domains. The best features of Freshworks CRM are unified communication, salesforce automation, marketing automation, etc. 

Thus, Freshworks CRM is an end-to-end solution to engage contextual conversations with multiple customers, nurture existing and new customers, drive deals with powerful artificial intelligence-based insights, and attract quality leads. It is best liked by the sales and marketing team as they can get quick access to the best deals to offer and help predict revenues with sales forecasting.

2. EchoApp:

EchoApp is another artificial intelligence-based customer support software that is a multichannel platform. It promises to increase the open rate of messages for any business by the consumers up to 600% with a minimum of 400%. The preferred channels like Viber, SMS, WhatsApp, Email, Line, etc., can be used by different businesses to maintain seamless communication with customers.

It is easy for the customer support team to find the best available time, likelihood of response, etc., based on artificial intelligence analytics. It is easy for different businesses to comprehend the campaign efforts. Many professionals like the different features of EchoApp like message creation, group creation, campaign creation, etc.

3. Freshdesk:

Freshdesk is an ideal customer support software that is ideal for startups, enterprises, freelancers, small and medium enterprises, etc. It is supported by all leading mobile devices like Android, IOS, etc., and works effectively on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Freshdesk is equipped with powerful features like a customer database, live chat system, alerts or escalations, ticket management, issue tracking, problem management, etc. The other highly acclaimed features of Freshdesk are not limited to social media integration, surveys, feedback, community forums, etc. It is based on the much-trusted cloud technology and optimizes the traditional communication channels.

4. Hubspot CRM:

Hubspot CRM is one of the leading customer support solutions that help different businesses manage the single lead and track their correct status. Thus, businesses don’t have to put in the excess time and effort to filter bulk leads. All inbound leads are easy to manage and act using the Hubspot CRM.

Hubspot CRM comes with multiple communication channels like video calls, emails, calls, etc. The intuitive dashboard with clear reporting and analytics tools of Hubspot CRM makes it a must-to-have in any business aiming to get high levels of customer satisfaction.

5. Zendesk:

Zendesk is one of the highly appreciated customer support software that aims at creating productive and meaningful relationships with different customers. It helps different businesses manage internal customers and workflows for all the team members for easy information exchange.

Zendesk is a comprehensive platform that comes with social media integration, live chat software, automated routing, SLA management, online community forums, etc. It is easy and quick to track the performance of different tools and manage the different customers with the best services. It helps different teams boost conversations and provide personal attention to all customers to achieve high levels of customer service.

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