Excellent customer service should always be your top priority regardless of the size of your business. That means doing everything you can to ensure your customers' experience is as best as possible. After all, happy customers usually are repeat customers, and they tell their friends when they've had a great consumer experience. One of the best places to start is to ensure your support team is armed with the right software to help your business meet and exceed your customers' expectations. These tools will also help your team stay more organized, productive, and efficient.
1. Live Chat
As a consumer, how often have you gotten frustrated because you couldn't speak to someone in customer support in real-time? Live chat software is an excellent solution for that. It allows customers to visit your website or app and ask questions as necessary, determine which product to buy, deal with a problem with a product or service they purchased recently, or something else. Your staff can answer questions as needed and, if you don't have the capacity for 24/7 support, you can connect your software to a chatbot that provides automated responses. For those who aren't convinced, know that 38 percent of customers admit they've made a purchase after taking part in a chat session. Having chat on your site could impact your bottom line.
2. Knowledge Bases
For every customer who wants to chat with your support team, at least one out there prefers to figure it out on their own. That's where knowledge base software comes into play. It's often a large database of important information about your products, services, and business, such as frequently asked questions (FAQs). These days, knowledge bases are largely artificial intelligence (AI)-backed, which means they generate answers automatically when your team or customers are searching for information. Some even flag incorrect or out-of-date information so that you can update or remove it.
3. Messaging Apps
Messaging apps are sort of like live chat software in that they can help increase the chances of your customers reaching a support team member in real-time. For example, have you ever gone on a business's Facebook page and sent a message? Depending on what you ask, you might get an automatic response like what are your hours or what is your location, or you may talk to a live person who monitors that company's social media options. Either way, it opens up another channel for communication. Chances are your customers are already using apps like Facebook or WhatsApp throughout the day to communicate, so if they can get their customer service there as well, it makes life feel a little more coherent. These apps work great for inquiries with quick, easy answers, and they can lead to further communication via phone, email, or in person.
4. Support Desk
If you're opening your business up to multiple communication channels — and these days, you should be — you'll need a way to organize it all into one central location. That's where your support desk software can be helpful. It takes all of those messages, tweets, emails, and phone calls and puts them all together so it can assign tickets, track responses, and create reports to ensure some customers aren't being overlooked or forgotten. It also allows you to answer more questions faster and, if you have multiple support departments, they can collaborate with ease.
5. Shared Inbox
Speaking of collaboration, shared inbox software can also help your team work together to speed up your customer response time. All inquiries go to a central email address, such as customersupport@yourbusiness, and multiple people can access and respond to those emails. It can take emails from multiple accounts and put them into one location so none get lost in the mix. Most shared inbox software also offers an internal messaging system so that your team can work together as well as an organizational system that allows your staff to divide emails into various topics.
6. Video Chat
A few years ago, video chat software probably wouldn't have made the list, but the pandemic changed all of that. People got used to "meeting" face-to-face without having to leave their homes or places of business. Seeing the person you're talking to can be helpful for both the customer and your employee. If a customer can show the support team what they're talking about and vice versa, it can speed up the customer service process and help improve the overall clarity of the conversation.
