The right customer support software can help you optimize your customer support tremendously. This is more important than ever since customer expectations are rising, and customer support is at the essence of these expectations. In this article, you can get some insight into five different types of customer support and find the right one for you.
The expectations of businesses’ customer service keep on rising. Customers have more options to choose from than ever before. This puts pressure on businesses to continuously improve in competitive markets. Recent research shows that many customers aren’t satisfied with the general customer service that they are offered. More than half of customers state that their expectations of customer service are higher than what they have previously encountered. Therefore every business should put the task of customer service high on their priority list. There is plenty of great customer support software to help businesses to improve their customer service.
Building a long-term relationship and retaining customers
When working to improve one’s customer service and find the right software, it’s important to remember that customer service isn’t about fixing small problems or patching things up. At its core, it’s about building a long-term relationship to retain customers and making your business thrive. Retaining customers is one of the most important tasks for any business – and to do this, customer support service plays a huge role.
To be able to offer your customer high-quality and valuable customer support, you can help yourself tremendously by choosing the right software. There are many different types of customer support software to assist you. Finding the right one depends on your business and where you need to improve. This article highlights five different types of customer support software to help you get started. You can read more and find the best business software solutions for you on SaaSGenius.com. Besides customer support software, you can also find software to help you in other areas of your business. Check out the huge selection and start optimizing your business today.
Cloud-based vs. On-premises
First, you need to determine whether you need cloud-based or on-premises software. The first one is ideal for smaller businesses that don’t have a dedicated IT staff. Cloud-based customer support software can be accessed from anywhere and has many advantages that’ll save you resources. The other option is on-premises customer support software. This is installed on your servers, so you have complete control over your data. This will usually be more easily integrated with other systems but is also more costly to incorporate. Therefore it’s usually a more popular solution for larger companies than small businesses.
When you know which one, you can check out these five different types of customer support software. Read more about the pros and cons of each of them.
1. Support and Help Desk Software
Help desk software can help you in numerous ways. Its primary function is to help customer support teams with ticket management. It can track performance, make reports on support issues, and provide valuable information on how to improve customer support. Help desk software can centralize every customer question on this one platform. This can help you to be much more efficient and thorough in your customer support – and at the same time, use fewer resources. You will be able to quickly answer all your customers’ questions, which is one of the primary things in improving your customer support. This type of software is unexpendable if you have a SaaS or e-commerce business.
2. Shared Inbox Software
Another popular type of customer support software is shared inbox software. This software collects emails from one or more email accounts and gathers them in one collaborative email. This gives you easy tools and integration options to optimize your email responses. You can also communicate internally using this software. You can categorize emails by dividing them into different inbox topics. Shared inbox software is relevant for companies of all sizes.
3. Knowledge Bases
A knowledge base is a very useful tool that gathers all relevant information in a shared internal database. These new knowledge base software data and artificial intelligence keep themselves constantly updated. It can also be a service to customers where they can type in a query and get answers from the knowledge base. So, it’s both a tool for employees to get information and for customers who would rather not contact the company directly.
Studies show that customers are willing to spend much more at businesses where they don’t have to contact the business to find answers – no less than 89% of customers feel like this. This is where a knowledge base can be a tremendous asset for your customer support service. This tool is great for companies of all sizes. It allows customers to help themselves, saving you a lot of time and resources while simultaneously improving your customer service.
4. Messaging and Chat Tools
One of the things that makes a major difference in the quality of your customer support is messaging and chat tools. Businesses state that without only two years of using a live chat feature, their customer retention and satisfaction rose by 36%. These features help you to quickly help your customers in an easy and seamless way. The right messaging and chat software should allow the customer support team to quickly find the previous conversation to optimize the answering time. It should also be able to work across your teams, so no matter what the query is regarding, the support team will be able to quickly locate the answer. Chat tools are important for all kinds of businesses.
5. Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management software is the last type of customer support software, often referred to as CRM. Customer relationship management software is not entirely about optimizing your customer support but also focuses on how to generate more profit. This software helps you to manage your relationship with customers on their entire buyer’s journey – not only if they have questions or need support. This is why this software is absolutely essential.
CRM records all customer interactions so you can work on optimizing their experience by offering the right support and the right recommendations. It provides a great overview of each customer and can give your insight into everything from their purchases to their likes and dislikes. To help a customer properly, it’s a great help that the customer support team has access to this information – and this is where CRM can help you. CRM is particularly suitable for bigger companies to need help to get an overview of their customers.
Why should you choose customer support software today?
Customer support service will not only make it easier for you to improve your communication with customers in terms of quicker responses. It will also make it much easier for you to get an overview and be able to focus on your most loyal customers. It will provide you with transparency into your sales pipeline and optimize the buyer’s journey. Helping you prioritize requests and offering data to optimize your responses will improve your customer experience.
Besides this, it will help you connect your teams internally and your sales, marketing, and support departments. It can give you a central system to share all your data and easily make communication much smoother. This will save you time and increase the quality and speed of customer support. All of this will help you increase the quality of your customer service and your entire business.
How to find the right one for your business?
You should ask yourself a few different questions when looking for the right types of customer support software. First, you should consider the size of your business and which software is necessary. You should always choose software of high quality, so make sure that the software becomes an asset that adds value and not an additional expense.
You should also read reviews of the software before choosing the specific one. Make sure that it’s easy to use. It should be easy to set up and easy to operate in a day-to-day work process. How viable is the software? How much worth does it add to your company? Will it make it easy to automate and optimize processes that will save you resources? Ask yourself these questions to ensure that the software is right for you. When you read reviews, you can gain great insight into other businesses’ experiences with the software and the pros and cons of the software. This allows you to decide whether this is a good investment for your business and will help you boost your business.
