Having great customer service software is integral to a brilliant customer service experience. In this article, we’ll look at the main types of customer service software you need for your company to help you pick the perfect provider for your business.
Customer Service Software: What Is It?
Customer service software is essentially an integrated system within an organisation for handling, responding to, arranging, and solving customer enquiries or staff requests. When considering customer service software it’s also important to think about customer feedback tools, as your customers’ opinions are vital to growing your own business. The main players on the feedback software market include the likes of Trustpilot, Yotpo, Feefo, Reviews.io, among others.
A shared inbox or spreadsheet can be unwieldy and may end up impeding employee or customer experience due to their inefficiency compared with today’s time-saving customer service software. Such software offers companies a ticketing system to combine customer discussions across channels in one convenient location. As a result, the support team is supplied with perspective as they’ll have knowledge about where the customer is, who they are, their previous queries (if any), and where they’re coming from, irrespective of the channel.
Additionally, customer service software can be incorporated with a customer relation management (CRM) to provide agents with admission to the context from outside sources, like a billing system or automation tool.
What Are the Advantages of Customer Service Software?
Your business – small or large – can benefit from customer services software. Whether you’re a small-scale, consumer-facing firm or international company, all customer questions will be answered speedily, with no need to recruit a throng of support representatives.
The main advantages of customer service software include:
- Nurturing a flawless agent experience. Once agents are equipped with the tools required to communicate and reorganise workflows, they’re all set to offer the best customer service. This encourages increased productivity by cutting down on the use of company resources and time.
- Enables companies to grow. If you use good customer service software, it will give you company the ability to scale smarter by allowing your business to develop and scale, in line with your customers’ requirements.
- Encourages customer loyalty and satisfaction. If your company offers prompt, tailored responses to its customers, this drives their loyalty and fulfilment.
What Types of Customer Service Software Are There?
Email is the backbone of any customer support software. It continues to be the most popular form of communication among older generations.
As well as being an internal form of support, it’s also an external one. For instance, a Payroll, IT or Human Resources team can use email to resolve queries for all members of staff, whether full-time or part-time.
Phone Support
One of the best forms of customer service software is a simple phone conversation to resolve a customer’s issue. Often, a human voice is more efficient than the time it takes to email a customer or speak to them using real-time chats.
Thanks to features such as smart internal routing, automatic ticket creation, access to a customer’s history, and call recordings, phone support empowers customer service reps to be more tactical in their approach.
Knowledge Base
In this day and age, many customers prefer to work out problems on their own. As such,
Support teams can enable customers to self-service by using a community forum, customer portal, or knowledge base. However, it’s important to provide your company’s support team with the right tools to make maintenance and knowledge creation a breeze. For example, To automate solutions for low-priority tickets, a knowledge base can be utilized to share representative know-how. If an article subject needs updating or if outdated content is needed, an employee can indicate.
Live Chat
Through live chat software, agents can resolve customer queries from wherever they are, in real-time from your company’s mobile app or website’s homepage. Thus, your company can be well ahead of the problem before it escalates. What’s more, live chat allows an organisation to provide support, 24-7. And chatbots can deal with enquiries for customers while your agents are unavailable by supplying the answers to commonly asked queries before a customer leaves their trolley.
Messaging Channels
Apps like Apple Business Chat WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger are on the rise, revolutionising the way people reach out. And this accessibility feature has surfaced in the customer service sphere, as well. Messaging channels enable customers to make contact via the same outlets they use to get in touch with loved ones.
In using customer service software to reach out over messaging channels, you’re able to keep communication and context in one secure hub. If you begin settling a customer’s problem with a message then with a follow-up phone call, all communication is conveniently recorded within the same support ticket.
Your customers want to connect with businesses using their preferred channels. Customer service software is the bread and butter of any company, allowing you to provide an outstanding level of customer service on a daily basis.
