Businesses all around the world are increasingly looking for more effective and practical ways of servicing their customer base, as consumer needs and expectations grow more demanding in the era of digitalization.
Brand loyalty, among other pertinent factors, has become much harder to maintain as a result of users being able to switch from one company to another with great ease depending on the level of service and customer satisfaction they get from one versus the other.
With this in mind, companies should equip themselves with the best possible customer service software to help manage this aspect of their work — and, luckily, there are plenty of innovative solutions your company can use to address customer relationship management and support.
With such an abundance of options to choose from, it can be challenging to find the right fit for your specific company’s needs; therefore, read on to find out how to choose the right customer service software for your business.
Table of Contents
The Basics of Customer Service Software
Software designed for customer service speeds up response rates improves workflows and helps your reps filter useful information. Simply put, its main purpose is to improve the effectiveness of your customer service team by letting them focus their efforts where it counts, as opposed to battling with technical issues and clunky internal processes every day.
The following are some ways that customer service software can benefit your team:
- Automating and streamlining through CRM tools, collaboration tools, and reporting solutions;
- Data analysis stemming from efficiently collecting, organizing, and responding to past, present, and incoming customer requests;
- Better overall communication by integrating channels such as voice calls, live messaging, video chat, email, and other alternatives.
Additional Factors to Consider
- Have a solid customer service strategy in place. Clear communication and proactive, customer-oriented objectives must be implemented throughout the customer service process, with or without any dedicated management tools or software. Remember that your customer service reps will require consistent support and frequent opportunities to voice their opinions on how your business can improve its customer service methods.
- Real interactions with customers are key. The tools used to automate certain processes should never take the position of your customer service team’s human representatives. Instead, the technology should support the work your representatives conduct as part of your service hub and free them up to intelligently approach customer conversations and handle situations that need greater attention.
- One size does not fit all. Customer service software is not universally applicable to every kind of business, meaning that you’ll require different tools or platforms based on your particular company goals, growth strategy, and target market. Let’s say you own an education business that offers online courses to graduate students; the kind of software your business acquaintance utilizes for their online clothing store will be different from the kind of software you use for your business.
Discussing the Needs of Your Team
No matter the industry you’re in, the software you choose will support your customer service team, as they are the ones taking the lead when it comes to managing tickets or customer inquiries. Asking your team members what they actually need from customer service software is therefore essential before committing to any solution.
If your staff has previously used a different help desk tool, find out what they like and, perhaps more importantly, what they don’t like about it. For instance, teams using Outlook or Gmail for customer service frequently complain about having a congested inbox, having no practical way of tracking customer support performance, and being unable to easily export or search through customer requests.
On the other hand, teams using feature-rich multichannel systems for customer care management are forced to cope with complicated interfaces, functionalities that are far too advanced, and extra training that takes away valuable time from what they should focus on, which is excellent customer service.
Therefore, the best kind of software for your CS team is one with a clear, user-friendly interface that makes it easy to allocate queries and requests, import and export relevant data, and also has a steep learning curve.
Once you’ve identified the exact needs and preferences of your customer service team, you will be well-positioned to obtain the right kind of software to address them.
Insights and Monitoring
A customer service solution will be the most useful for you if it provides streamlined insights into your customers and the performance results of your team. The insights should be both qualitative and quantitative in nature, while also being integrated with a reporting functionality that makes it easy to keep track of and arrange the KPIs that are most important to your company.
For instance, depending on your business needs, the right customer service software could monitor the exchanges between your team and your customers to quickly spot recurring themes in their inquiries or support requests. This kind of feature enables you to better understand the common struggles and pain points that your customers may face when interacting with your business or products or services. It can also help you build a detailed FAQ list to make it easier for customers to get the information they need on their own.
Additionally, for better data analysis, look for software that comes with a comprehensive customer data platform that collects and organizes data from multiple sources into a single, comprehensive client database containing details on all customer interactions with your business.
Other kinds of metrics that a customer service solution may deliver include average response times, retention rates, issue resolution rates, and customer satisfaction rates. This data depends on the channels of communication your company uses the most.
Determining Which Communication Channel to Use
As a rule of thumb, aim to meet your customers where they wish to communicate with you, while also taking into account which communication channels your customer support team excels at. For instance, live chat may be the most adequate communication route for online clothing stores. However, installation and troubleshooting advice is frequently given over the phone by tech companies.
Offering several different methods to contact your business is the best way of guaranteeing that you accommodate as many kinds of customers as possible. However, if running multiple communication channels is challenging for you or the current capacity of your customer care team, pinpoint at least one or two channels your target customers use. Then, make sure that the customer service solution you opt for is able to integrate with those channels.
The following are the three most prominent channels of communication that can be integrated with the majority of customer service software solutions today.
Live Chat
Live chat can be made available on your website or via social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Many customers prefer live chat because it typically provides real-time resolutions without the fuss of typing out a whole email.
Live chat software often includes nifty functionalities such as auto-replies (e.g. to notify the inquiring customer of your business hours or usual response times). In contrast, integration with customer service software could give you features like setting up keywords or phrases that trigger certain responses (especially if the message is related to a frequently asked question).
Voice Calls
Many people still prefer talking to a real person over the phone or via an online voice call. For some businesses, this communication channel may be the most beneficial, as it often gives the customer service rep a great segue to sell an additional product or request feedback after successfully resolving an issue.
For voice calls to be efficient, your customer service team will need to have an efficient tool that allows them to access necessary user data as they talk, within seconds. Voice calls can also be integrated with the tool to automatically save call recordings onto the cloud. Advanced AI technology used in some solutions can even listen to the recordings to locate commonalities or assess the level of customer satisfaction.
Social Media Messaging
The most straightforward way of communicating with customers is social media messaging. This form of communication is often used by online businesses that wish to expand brand awareness, cater to diverse audiences by maintaining an online presence across different social platforms, expand their digital marketing strategy, and collect huge amounts of data on their ideal customer profile.
Many customer service software solutions offer the ability to integrate with the top social media networks in use today. Apart from the chat function, CS software can also track incoming comments, collect engagement data, and build statistics reports by collating information from different social media networks.
Takeaway
The right kind of customer service software will vastly improve the ability of your team to respond to the needs of existing customers and bring in new ones. Spend quality time and effort to decide what kind of software solution best suits your particular business goals before rushing out to get the first one that pops up in your web searches.
Discussing your choice with your customer service team is definitely a must; however, to gain a better understanding of your options, compare different solutions based on the simplicity of use, integration options, monitoring, and data analysis tools, and ultimately — cost.
We hope that this guide has given you some food for thought on how to pick the best customer service software solution for your business!
I am a passionate, adventurous, and insatiate learner who loves to write about the latest technology trends. My experience working in an MNC has motivated me to understand that there are certain niche requirements for writing strategically about brands’ messages towards people’s interests which I’ve mastered over time through trial and error of many projects under various clients across diverse industries. It is my honest effort to put my experiences and knowledge of industry towards readers.
