Top 7 Customer Service Software for Your Business

Imagine if your support agents had access to a unified platform that seamlessly manages customer inquiries, streamlines issue resolution, and enhances collaboration.

With the right customer service software in place, your team can quickly resolve your customer queries and concerns, provide personalized support, and consistently exceed expectations. But what happens if you end up choosing the wrong customer service software?

It could spell disaster for your business’s reputation and growth potential.

It’s clear—customer service software helps elevate your customer support efforts, build a loyal customer base, and gain a competitive edge in your industry.

But with countless options available, how do you determine which customer service management software best fits your organization?

This is what we’re helping you with today! In this article, we’ll unveil the top seven best customer service software and solutions carefully selected to address the unique needs of your business.

So, if you’re ready to make your customer support software decision, let’s begin!

What is customer service software?

Customer service software refers to a set of digital tools and platforms designed to streamline and enhance customer support processes.

It encompasses a wide range of applications, including ticketing systems, live chat platforms, knowledge bases, customer relationship management (CRM) software, and social media management tools. Customer service software solutions help customer service agents manage and respond to customer inquiries, resolve issues efficiently, and maintain positive customer relationships.

The primary goal of customer service software is to optimize the customer support experience, enabling businesses to deliver prompt, personalized, and effective assistance to their customers.

Although customer service software can perform multiple functions for you, the main functions performed by it are:

• Ticket Management
• Multichannel Support
• Knowledge Base and Self-Service
• Live Chat and Chatbots
• Reporting and Analytics

By consolidating various communication channels into a centralized platform, customer service software enables businesses to provide consistent and efficient support across multiple touchpoints, such as email, phone, chat, various social media channels, and self-service portals.

Why do you need customer service software?

Implementing a customer service software solution can bring a whole bunch of benefits to your business when it comes to handling customer inquiries and support requests. Let’s dive into five key advantages that customer service software tools can offer:

Enhanced Efficiency and Productivity

Picture this – instead of juggling customer inquiries from different channels like emails, chats, and phone calls separately, customer service software centralizes everything in one place. This means your customer service agents can easily manage and prioritize tickets, ensuring no query slips through the cracks.

Read More: The 10 Best Customer Service Software for Small Business

Plus, with automation features like email routing and chatbots, you can streamline repetitive tasks, saving the precious time of your customer service teams. With this your customer service representatives can focus on tackling complex issues and resolving them faster. Imagine the boost in productivity and the satisfied customers that will result!

Improved Customer Satisfaction

We all know how crucial it is to keep your customers happy. Customer service software helps you achieve just that. With features like ticket tracking, customers can stay in the loop about the progress of their inquiries, reducing their anxiety and increasing transparency.

And guess what? When customers can find answers to their questions independently through a self-service knowledge base or FAQs, they’ll feel empowered and satisfied. It’s a win-win situation for customers and your customer service team, saving everyone involved time and effort.

Effective Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing

Teamwork makes the dream work, right? Well, customer service software promotes collaboration among your support agents and departments. They can communicate seamlessly within the software, discussing complex issues and seeking input from their colleagues. This collaboration means faster problem-solving and prevents duplicate efforts.

Oh, and don’t forget about the knowledge base! You can create a treasure trove of helpful articles, tutorials, and troubleshooting guides to empower your team and ensure consistent customer responses. Sharing knowledge has never been easier!

Actionable Insights and Data-driven Decision Making

Wouldn’t it be great to have a clear understanding of your support team’s performance and your customer’s behavior? Customer service software offers robust reporting and analytics features to provide valuable insights. By analyzing metrics like response times, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction scores, you can identify areas for improvement.

It’s like having a GPS for making data-driven decisions! You can optimize your support processes, allocate resources effectively, and even implement targeted training programs for your support agents. You can also gather customer feedback within the software to spot patterns and proactively address recurring issues. Talk about continuous improvement!

Scalability and Growth

Your support needs will also increase as your business expands and your customer base grows. Here’s where customer service software shines. It’s designed to scale with your organization, ensuring that your support operations remain seamless and efficient even during periods of rapid growth.

Imagine being able to handle a higher volume of customer inquiries without compromising response times or the quality of service. That’s the beauty of having a flexible and scalable customer service software solution.

What to look for in customer service software?

When evaluating your options, keep these five key factors in mind to ensure you choose the right software for your business:

Multichannel Support and Integration

Today’s customers contact you through email, chat, social media, and phone calls. It’s a mixed bag of communication channels. So, when choosing customer service software, ensure it can handle all these channels seamlessly. You want software that integrates with your existing platforms, like your CRM system or help desk platform. It’s all about providing a unified and consistent support experience.

Ticket Management and Workflow Automation

You need customer service software to help you stay organized and prioritize customer inquiries. Look for features like automated ticket assignment and routing so you don’t have to manually shuffle tickets around.

Workflow automation is the cherry on top – it takes care of repetitive tasks and ensures tickets reach the right teams or agents. Less manual work, more time to focus on solving customer issues!

Knowledge Base and Self-Service Options

In times when 70% of the customers prefer to find answers themselves instead of using phone or email, you’d want to empower your customers with a knowledge base. It’s like a library of helpful articles, FAQs, and guides.

Customers love being able to find answers to their questions independently. Look for customer service software that lets you create and manage your knowledge base easily. Oh, and customization is key! You want to make it visually appealing and easy to search so customers can find what they need in a snap.

Reporting and Analytics Capabilities

Your customer service software should provide robust reporting and analytics features. You want to track key metrics like response times, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction scores. This data gives you a pulse on your support operations and helps you identify areas for improvement.

Customizable dashboards and reports? Yes, please! You should be able to focus on the metrics that matter most to your business.

Scalability and Flexibility

As time goes by, your business will grow. You need customer service software that can keep up. Look for software that can handle higher volumes of inquiries without breaking a sweat. You don’t want your customer support system or operations to crumble under the weight of success. And flexibility is key too. Your business is unique, so you want software that can adapt to your workflows and specific requirements. It’s all about customization.

The Top 7 Customer Service Software for Your Business

Keeping

Are you the team that provides customer support through email? Are you looking to take it up a notch? Look no further than Keeping!

Keeping is the perfect customer service software for small teams who are starting to deliver excellent customer experiences. Keeping works directly on top of Gmail to assist small businesses in providing top-notch customer assistance. Your team can collaborate to handle customer inquiries by using Keeping to manage a shared mailbox.

When starting out, we know you may not want to invest heavily in customer service software, so we’ve kept the price only at $8 per user per month. Having said that, don’t take Keeping’s price as a symbol of its capabilities.

You can set up Keeping in as less as 15 minutes, and once that is done, you can manage all your tickets within the good old Gmail. Since Keeping works right inside your Gmail mailbox means you do not even have to spend time training your customer support team!

Key Features

• Collaboration features such as assigning messages, sharing internal notes, and updating the status of the ticket, all without ever leaving Gmail.
• Shopify integration that lets you connect your Shopify customer inside Keeping.
• Create multiple shared inboxes or respond from your personal inbox—the choice is yours!
• Create templates that can be shared and inserted into your responses with one click.
• Advanced reporting and analytics that give you data you need to know about how your team responds to your customers.

Pricing: Plans at Keeping start at as low as $8/agent/month

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a pretty popular customer service software that provides a wide array of features to help businesses of all sizes provide excellent customer service.

With its user-friendly interface and powerful features, Freshdesk streamlines customer interactions, boosts productivity, and enhances overall customer satisfaction.

Along with providing you with all the basic features like ticket management, automation, reporting, and analytics, this software also has quite a few advanced features.

Key Features

• Set ticket response and resolution deadlines depending on certain business hours or categories.
• Automatically recommend ticket fields for classifying, arranging, and directing incoming tickets
• Automate repeated activities to perform several actions on a ticket with a single click.
• To keep track of common problems and provide consistent responses, group together related tickets.
• Divide complicated, multi-stage problems into smaller child tickets to solve them more quickly.

Pricing: Freshdesk is free for up to 10 agents. Paid plans start at $15/month/agent.

Zoho Desk

The third customer service software that we have on our list is the Zoho Desk. This customer service software is super popular, especially among sales-focused teams. The list of features you get with Zoho Desk is endless. You get all the basic features you’d need and some advanced and unique features.

This customer service software may be difficult to navigate for small businesses or startups, but enterprise businesses will love Zoho Desk. With Zoho Desk, you can also offer multichannel support to your customers. This feature is not available with Freshdesk’s customer support software.

Key Features

• AI called Zia provides relevant solution suggestions, analyzes sentiment, and even auto-tags your tickets.
• Manage tickets from various channels such as email, social media, and instant messaging in one place.
• Create a repository of solutions for commonly asked questions. Build and grow a community of customers, prospects, and visitors.
• Create blueprints to manage complex cross-functional service processes efficiently.

Pricing: Plans at Zoho Desk start at $14/agent/month.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a top customer service platform that provides multichannel support for your customers with the help of a great ticketing system and AI-powered bots. It is a great option for organizations of all sizes because it also has self-service, audio calls, and reporting features.

Users of Zendesk laud its customizable choices and ease of use. They appreciate the simple user interface and the ticketing system’s connections to WhatsApp, email, and phone. However, some users wish current capabilities (such as automation and triggers) had more sophisticated functionality.

Key Features

• Enhance your agents by deflecting common questions with Zendesk bots.
• Customer conversations and information live in a centralized workspace, so agents get all the tools and customer context they need to provide personalized service across any channel.
• Get live updates about incoming messages and respond in real-time across email, chat, phone, and messaging.
• Triage conversations, smooth workflows, and fill knowledge gaps without developers or data scientists.

Pricing: Plans at Zendesk start at $49/agent/month.

Aircall 

Just as support tool like Keeping is for your email support needs, Aircall is for telephone support needs. Aircall is a simple-to-use software that acts as your cloud-based call center. There is no denying the fact that even today, call support is preferred by many customers.

So, if your business wants to provide call support—but without burning a hole in the pocket—Aircall is the perfect solution!

They feature call queuing, IVR, and the opportunity to set personalized business hours in all their phone assistance plans. All plans include those essential capabilities, enabling your staff to launch phone assistance rapidly.

Key Features

• Aircall lets you instantly create toll-free numbers in your local area code or any other country.
• The collaborative conversation feature is available via the call conference feature.
• Set up, and customize schedules to confirm exactly when each of your numbers is available to receive calls.
• Call routing feature that lets you direct calls to the correct agent.
• Warm transfers allow your teammates to quickly speak to one another before transferring an ongoing call.

Pricing: Plans start at $30/agent/month. A minimum of 3 users is mandatory.

LiveAgent

LiveAgent is the right software for teams that provide live chat support. LiveAgent helps you manage all customer inquiries from numerous channels in a single platform.

This software also saves you time, simplifies the process, and allows you to increase the profitability of your support team.

While live chat is their main focus, it also has features like email ticketing, live chat, and social media integration. It was designed with today’s customer service team in mind. Your personnel must navigate a single interface to be there for clients on whichever channel you require.

Key Features

• Audit logs that can be used as reference points if queries escalate
• Automatically create an optimal workload for your agents, which will save your agents from burnout.
• Specify business hours to make sure you meet your SLA levels with your customers.
• Distribute tickets and support agents into various departments for faster and more efficient ticket resolution.
• Create filters to sort through tickets easily
• Create internal notes for your colleagues inside each ticket for better collaboration.
• Merge multiple tickets about the same issue into one ticket to avoid chaos during resolution.

Pricing: LiveAgent has a forever free plan, and paid plans start at $15/agent/month.

HelpScout

Another great customer service software on our list is HelpScout. Now, HelpScout is the best option for non-profits. We say this because they offer up to 100% discounts if you’re eligible as a non-profit.

HelpScout is still great if you’re not a non-profit. You can create shared inboxes for your team to facilitate collaboration. If your team cannot promptly reply to incoming chat requests, you can also allow your customers to email you. The user interface is also very friendly. You won’t need to spend much time teaching your team how to use this software.

Key Features

• Track and show customer data to deliver better service quickly, regardless of the channel.
• Install Beacon and begin interacting with clients when you launch your app or website.
• Private notes, collision detection, assignments, and more help your team works better.
• Use customer properties and events to reach the right customers at the right time with your message.

Pricing: Plans at HelpScout start at $20/agent/month.

Why Keeping is The Best for Your Small Business

On our list of best customer software, there are plenty of software solutions with the most advanced features with value for money. But we’ll still say that Keeping is the right solution for your small business.

As a small business:

• Keeping gives you the affordability that the other software solutions on our list haven’t been able to provide.
• Keeping is easy to set up, which reduces technical costs and saves time.
• Keeping is easy to use, saving time and money to be spent on training your team on efficiently using new customer service software.
• Keeping does not overwhelm your team with too many features your business does not need at this level.
• Keeping has the perfect blend of features to start your journey to delivering excellent customer service.

We’re sure you are ready to give Keeping a try now. Click below and get started!