Ever bought a product online for which you needed the support – Only to realize you couldn’t find any help for days.
Out of frustration, you may refund the product because the company is not using any customer service software.
I was in a similar boat a while back.
India consists of two e-commerce giants – Flipkart and Amazon. However, I always make my purchases with Amazon.
One simple reason
Great customer service, easily accessible support, and top-notch service.
You can spend your money all day long on marketing and sales, but if you do not have the right toolkit and top-notch customer service, there is enough option for the users today.
In this HOLY Guide – We will talk everything about having and implementing a successful Customer Service Software to retain your customers.
What is Customer Service Software?
A customer service software is defined as a software solution that gives the customer a way to connect with your business to get their queries solved and receive a better experience.
It involves a set of using the right tool to receive, organize, collaborate your customer’s communication at one place centrally located and accessible with your entire team.
According to Gartner’s study, the customer service industry and customer relationship software industry grew by 15.8% to reach $48.2 billion in 2018.
Regardless of whether you are a small or big business, customer service today plays a major role in defining your success; more importantly, choosing the right customer service solution will make it easier to deliver a better customer experience.
How to choose the best customer service software for you?
Following are the modern types of customer support software that might be ideal for your business to deliver modern customer service solutions.
1. Self-help Knowledge base
It’s impossible to answer all the questions on time. We have all been there. You can end up losing customers very rapidly if your customers do not get the answers on time.
This can be easily solved by using a self-help knowledge base or customer self-service app.
By using knowledge base software – You can quickly create self-service knowledge base articles by writing all your how-to articles, guides, videos, list of features, and FAQs all under the same interface, aka self-service tools, making it extremely simple for your customers to find all the resources for their queries.
2. Shared Inbox
You might have come across a more modern term in modern times – Shared Inbox.
However, are you still wondering what a shared inbox is?
Shared Inbox is a modern way of turning your regular mail into a shared one where you can collaborate with your team members, making it easy for your team to respond to customer queries quickly and efficiently.
Here are some types of inboxes usually set up as a shared Inbox by most companies:
- A support Inbox usually set up for support reps: support@yourdomain.com
- A sales Inbox usually set up for sales reps: sales@yourdomain.com
- A simple hello inbox usually set up for basic introduction: hello@yourdomain.com
Not only that, modern CEOs and heads of operations have started using shared inbox as well to share emails with their team because very often – “Customers are contacting C” level executives and heads of departments. In such a case, a shared inbox can quickly and efficiently either transfer those emails to the relevant department or add their respective team member to answer.
It’s easy to say that Shared Inbox is the modern way of ticket management.
Some modern Technology also offers social media integrations with platforms like Facebook (Facebook Messenger for Business Pages), Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp, Line, etc., functionality to make customer communication truly multi-channel support that can increase team productivity.
Shared Inbox makes customer conversation easy.
3. Live Chat Software & Widgets
Have you ever noticed a small widget usually located either on the bottom left or right corner of any site where you can easily contact someone from the company to solve your queries?
Those widgets are often Livechat widgets where you can speak with a corresponding company team member quickly.
Having a Livechat can significantly help you make your customers happy by solving their queries faster or helping you close leads who often prefer to buy from the companies that offer livechat, boosting trust and confidence in that company.
Having a livechat with agents is very important and the easiest way to interact with your customers and delivering them with the highest customer satisfaction.
Today’s most modern customer support platform offers an advanced feature known as “Conversation Threads” that integrates emails, and chats under the same roof making it easy for you and your customers.
4. Customer Service Management Software
These are traditional customer service helpdesk systems that are still used by large corporations and IT services that lack the modern flexibility of moving tickets from shared inbox to another. However, these often offer custom API integration solutions to help you design a custom system.
Hence, used by big IT companies and large call centers as a ticketing system.
5. Phone Support Software
Today, big companies often offer phone call support in many countries as it’s one of the best ways to resolve customer queries quickly. However, this can get really expensive as you cannot fully automate phone support.
This kind of software is not built for modern companies, start-ups, e-commerce sites but is often built for companies serving millions of customers, aka large corporate.
However, many of these large corporations still lack the ability to implement modern automated helpdesk.
6. Use of Automation using Chatbot and Workflow Management
Customers hate waiting, and so do companies.
Hence, modern customer service software offers Workflow Automation management and bots to automate as much customer service as possible.
The use of bots is essential for customer service because it allows you to handle customer requests. It is also useful for dealing with spam and harassing emails.
Who can use customer support software?
Any business looking for an affordable and easy way to handle customer support and solve customer issues is welcome. The software, however, will not be able to handle every type of question. There are certain types of questions that are best suited for a human to answer.
Here is some business who should implement a help desk software to resolve support tickets in collaboration with their team asap:
- Small Businesses.
- E-commerce Companies. (especially Direct To Consumer business).
- Digital Marketing Agencies.
- SaaS Companies.
- Online Stock Brokers.
- Digital Marketplaces.
- Real Estate Asset Management Companies.
In short, anyone who cares about providing great customer service needs to implement customer support software asap.
How will you benefit from good customer service software?
You will benefit from good customer service software in the following ways:
1. Improve Customer Service Ratings: Customers are significant to any business. They can be your best asset and also your worst nightmare. Good customer service software will help you to provide better customer service and make the customer feel happy.
2. Increase Retention: You can increase customer loyalty by providing great customer service. They will be more likely to come back to you for their next purchase or at least recommend you to their friends.
3. Improve Productivity: Good customer service software can help you to increase productivity. It will allow you to connect with your customers easily and to deal with them efficiently.
4. Reduce Operational Costs: It will also reduce your operational costs. You will be able to process your customer service requests quickly and efficiently.
5. Improve Employee Morale: Good customer service software can help you to improve employee morale. They will feel more appreciated and feel empowered by the tools and options that you provide them with.
6. Improve Workflow: Good customer service software will also help you to improve workflow. It will allow you to process customer requests quickly and resolve them on time.
How will you measure the success of your company?
You will measure the success of your company by measuring the following things:
1. Customer Retention Rate
The customer retention rate is the percentage of customers who have repurchased your product or service in the past 12 months.
2. Customer Net Promoter Score
NPS, aka Net Promoter Score, is a simple customer satisfaction score. This metric measures how likely your customers are to recommend you to their friends and family. It is calculated by asking your customers how likely they would be to recommend you, on a scale from 0 to 10.
3. Customer Service Score or Customer Satisfaction Rating
Customer feedback is the most essential. This is a metric that measures the quality of customer service you provide. It is calculated by asking customers how they were treated by your company when they requested their product or service.
Common Features of Customer Service Software
With 100s of solution in the market, here are some of the most common feature for Customer Service Tools:
1. Team Collaboration:
It’s essential that the customer service software needs to offer team collaboration feature in the modern era. When an email is sent to support@ or info@ or sales@, your software needs to support the ability to let your team collaborate and respond to the customer query effectively.
2. Advanced Text Editor:
We all hate replying to the same queries over and over again. Over 50% of the questions that companies often get are similar. In such a case, most modern-era customer service software offers the ability to save and use Canned responses.
Canned replies are nothing but a preset answer that you can select and answer to your customers, helping your service rep and customer service teams save time, making your customer interactions faster, and increasing your agent productivity.
Some modern text-editor even offer AI to auto-compose the answers.
3. Third-Party Integration:
Your software needs to offer the right set of integration, and these are vital for software to communicate with other software that you are going to use.
Companies could often use software internal team communication software like Microsoft Teams, Slack, or Flock, and CRM software like Pipedrive, salesforce service cloud or HubSpot, or e-commerce integrations like Shopify and WooCommerce to instantly fetch the customer data.
In such a case, integrations can help you save a lot of time transferring the data from one platform to another platform in real-time.
4. Mobile App
Mobile Apps are essential to answer your customers quickly because today, the world basically relies on a notification system, and one always has access to their phone.
Usually, companies offer mobile devices like Android App, iOS App, or even Desktop and Mac software in the modern era of customer service software with beautiful looking interfaces.
How to choose the right customer service software for your small business
Now that we have the basics covered, it’s time to understand which customer service software is right for your business.
While there are loads of tools for customer service available in the market, ask yourself the experience you want to deliver to your customer and what’s your budget.
It’s not the features that matter, but the experience you want to offer to your customers. Here is a checklist that will help you to do so.
1. Budget: While starting your business, you need to ensure that you do not go out there to buy the most expensive solution because expensive doesn’t equal the right solution.
2. Make a list of Problems: Write a list of all the potential you could have, and ensure that the solution you are looking for covers over 80% of them.
3. Testing the Support of Company: Always make sure to test the support of the company. You will be making your investment because the software is not expensive; it’s an investment, and moving can get even more expensive.
Look at how friendly they are, check out their knowledgebase, videos, how-to guides. Most efficient companies will get all of these covered for you.
4. Don’t fall into the “Fancy Feature” Trap: You will often see a feature in a software that will Wow you but ask yourself, is that what you really need? Using that “Fancy Feature,” will you be able to solve your customer’s problem quickly?
Most likely, your answer will be “No.”
This is where the second point in this checklist is important.
5. Choose the “top 2”: Once you have found your options from hundreds of customer care software, choose the top 2 customer support solutions and sign up for both the software. Now play around for a few days to see if that fits perfectly with your requirement by making communications with customers easy.
Once you have found the right solution at the right place, you are now all set to choose your customer service software.
Customer Success should be every companies’ mission
Zappos and Amazon are a price example of what a customer success-driven company looks like. As a result, look at where Amazon is today. One of the most known and successful brands in the world. One sole reason – Customer Success is their mission.
“The best way to build a business is not by focusing on customers but by focusing on customers.”—Steve Blank, professor at Stanford University and author of The Startup Owner’s Manual
Customer success should be a mission, not a job.
If your company’s sole purpose or mission is not to serve your customers and solve your customers’ problems, you will never grow regardless of the product or solution you are selling.
Your customers’ success is your success! Great service is always a key factor in a business’s success.
A stellar customer experience with great customer service skills will increase your customer happiness ratings, improve your customer journey and customer satisfaction surveys.
Often FAQs that people ask:
1. Is Social Media your new customer service portal?
Believe it or not, but yes. Social Media has become a critical part of customer service. Your leads or customers can contact you at any random place today, and if you aren’t available, you can have one angry user.
Hence, tools integrating Social Media Inbox to your Customer Service Software is essential.
2. What is the best customer support software best for your organization?
I’ll be biased over here. I’ve used over seven different customer support software in the last few years to remain frustrated as none of them could solve the issues properly, or overly complicated, or very expensive.
Hence, we at Little SaaS, Inc. ended up building Communication, catering to the needs of small businesses, e-commerce, SaaS companies, and digital marketing agencies.
Communication was built to bridge the customer communications issues helping you provide the best customer service experiences.
Communication is used by customer support teams from over a hundred countries to help you manage customer relationship management and have happy customers.
We offer a 100% Free Trial. You can give Communication a try. It also comes with a money-back guarantee if you are not satisfied. If you like to schedule a free 1:1 personalized demo call, you can click here.
Communication solves all the problems we have mentioned above, while many amazing new features are currently on the roadmap.
3. What is the best customer support remote desktop software?
If you are looking to provide customer support over a remote desktop screen sharing, then here are my top four recommendations: Team Viewer, Zoom, Google Hangout, and AnyDesk
4. What is the best software for SaaS customer success management?
Communication is built by people who understand SaaS in the best way. We highly recommend you trying out Communication.
5. What is the best software to maintain the knowledge base for a multi-customer contact center?
Communication is built keeping this in mind. It’s only the only few customer service software in the world that allows you to maintain multiple knowledge bases under the same workspace with the ease of creating one with just a click of a button.
6. What is the best customer support tool for startups easiest to use
Communication is built by a startup for another startup. It’s easy as taking just 15 minutes of your time to set up your customer service software fully, aka helpdesk, up and running.
[Bonus Tip] 7. Is there a fully free customer service software with a help desk?
Communication currently offers free startup plans for a company that has got less than two team members. If you are one of them, please email us at support@littlesaas.com with the title “Free Startup Plan” and hook you one. No catch, the plan is Free for life.
Conclusion
Customer Service software is important for your business because it enhances your customer service levels and helps you have better control over your business through the use of excellent customer service software.
However, when choosing the best customer service software, you need to make sure that you choose the right one.
When you do, you will not only enjoy the benefits of getting customer happiness, but you will also be able to enjoy your day-to-day life with ease, and hence, you need to make sure that you choose the best one.