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What Is Customer Support Software?

As the name suggests, customer support software is a unified multichannel tool that enhances the communication between customers and customer support agents. You can organize, keep track of tickets raised and handle troubleshoot requests more effectively to deliver better customer support services. 

The best customer support software can enhance the process of how a customer handles tickets and customer troubleshoot requests. Common features of customer support software are:

  • Helpdesk functionalities
  • Ticketing handling & point of contact
  • CRM
  • Contact management
  • Lead extraction
  • Registration mechanisms
  • Knowledge base builders

You should pick the best customer support software for businesses that has all the features that your businesses require.

Customer Support Software: Use Free Trials


There are endless tools available in the market when you go on searching for customer support software for your business. Finding the one tool that complements your business perfectly is challenging.

To find the best option for your business, you should consider signing up for free trials of the industry-leading customer support software providers. By using a couple of different software, you can get an idea of the features that you need and how each software performs. You can also compare the ratings of the top software or you can compare customer satisfaction ratings available online.

Customer Support Software: Targeted Businesses


While choosing the best customer support software, keep in mind that each software offers different features for different businesses. The different customer support software breaks down as follows:

  • Small Business Buyers: Small businesses who wish to evolve beyond their current ticket handing features and add trouble ticketing and customer interaction tracking to boost customer relationships and enhance their customer support capabilities should buy software that caters to the needs of small businesses.
  • High-Volume Call Center Buyers: Businesses that operate as one or multiple huge call centers should opt for software that can offer features on a large scale. More than often, these software help call centers in automating the rules and scripts which. These businesses are also searching for computer telephony integration.
  • Enterprise Buyers: Enterprise-level customer support software can help businesses that have complex operational needs. They can help in integrating software solutions across different business departments and business units. 
  • Field Service Buyers: These buyers work for huge companies that offer services on clients’ locations and will usually benefit from mobile access. These buyers will keep looking for efficient client data with integration.

Customer Support Software for Enterprises


Customer support software is essential for every large business, especially when they can offer unique and innovative solutions for businesses that can improve the customer experience and brand reputation. Big brands make the customer their priority and by using the best customer support software, businesses can make the process more streamlined. These systems remove friction from traditional communication channels and offer better solutions, which makes it easy for businesses to stay in touch with customers from using multi-channel tools and reduce the stress placed on customer support teams. 

The best customer support tools can boost customer ticketing handling, track NPS, and provide crucial data insights.

Type of Customer Support Software


There are four main types of customer support software, they’re categorized according to the unique needs of a business and the type of service businesses wish to offer to their customers.

  • Proactive Support Tools: Proactive support tools help in automating support, monitoring, and problem-solving process, responding to queries 24/7 and others without having a human sitting behind a desktop all day long.
  • Pre-emptive Support Tools: These tools help in generating and collecting information from the database and the log files which are later utilized to solve customer problems.
  • Self-Support Tools: Databases and online knowledge bases created by agents for customers to fix their technical problems by themselves.
  • Assisted (Live) Support Tools: These tools allow direct communication between the agents and the users, where an agent is allowed remote access to a customer’s desktop to diagnose and troubleshoot customer problems.

Top Customer Support Software in Industry


Here are the best customer support software according to industry expert ratings and customer satisfaction ratings:

  • Freshdesk: Freshdesk is a popular customer support solution designed to respond to the needs of businesses of all scales, with multi-channel capability and game mechanisms for enhancing customer support agent productivity.
  • Zendesk: Zendesk is one of the best cloud-hosted customer support tools, made famous because of its easy setup and maintenance. The software can be integrated with multiple software and is full of quality features.
  • Salesforce Service Cloud: Cloud-based interactive desk with multiple communication channels, easily integrated with social media to improve the customer support process. Read the full article…
  • Samanage: Samanage is another great tool for boosting the customer support capabilities of a business and large organization.
  • Desk.com: Desk.com isn’t as well-known but it can deliver fast, reliable, and highly dedicated customer support based on customer needs.

Key Features of Customer Support Software


Based on the type of customer support software you’re using; the list of basic and advanced features varies. Here’s a list of the most common features offered by customer support software:

  • Live Chat: Allows customer support agents to chat with customers online and instantly capture key points from the interactions. As chatting is more convenient than waiting on the phone for a long time, most customers prefer chatting with agents. 
  • Customer Self-Service: Offers an online customer portal/knowledge base where customers can find answers to the most common problems. The knowledge base often contains searchable forms, FAQs, documents, how-to guides and so much more. If the answer to a customer’s problem isn’t available in the knowledge base, customers will have to raise tickets. 
  • Knowledge-Base: Handles documentation or logs of previously solved customer problems. These resources can be made public using a website or can be used for internal problem solving by agents. 
  •  Multi-channel Management: Supports customer interactions that have been received from various channels including email, live chat, phone, website, social media accounts, and others. 
  • Analytics and Reporting: Allows managers to create customized and regular reports that provide better insight into how the team is performing, the customer satisfaction rating, time for resolving a ticket, and other major factors.
  • Routing for Calls and Messages: This feature reduces errors by ensuring that calls and messages are being sent to the right team. More advanced customer support software often provides businesses with an automated distribution system by relying on an agent’s skill level or customer satisfaction rating by an agent or availability. Some customer support software also allows users to set their own methods of routing calls and messages.
  • Visitor Monitoring: Allows businesses to track where the visitors come from and how they interact with your website. With this additional data, customers can handle customers better and more efficiently. Aside from improving customer service levels, this feature can also help in generating leads. 
  • Customer Feedback: Allows customers to rate interactions with agents and share feedback on how the problems were resolved. Managers can use this feedback to check how well an agent is performing and look for ways on how to improve customer interaction. 

Benefits of Customer Support Software


An incredible customer service tool boosts customer satisfaction, strengthens CSRs, and provides transparency and reporting to you on the support process. Here are some of the best benefits of using customer support software:

  • Automated Solution: Providing customer support to customers without automation can be quite difficult and tedious. Tracking customer interactions can be incredibly tough for your business. Engaging old and new customers is the life of any business, that’s why you should make sure you are well-prepared in managing customer support effectively. If your business is known to have poor customer support, it’ll be almost impossible to rid your business of that. 
  • Better Accountability: The best customer support software allows businesses to track customer issues and the performance of agents. The whole company can see how an inquiry was handled. Using such a solution can allow you to monitor the performance of your agents, enabling you to see which agents are performing well and which aren’t. 
  • Enhanced Level of Co-ordination: If a customer support software is integrated with the sales force tool, it can offer better transparency into the customer’s data. This can provide you benefits such as letting sales representatives know if there are any pending issues with the customer before making a call or informing an agent that repair parts have been ordered so the customer doesn’t order double parts. 
  • Improved Asset Management: Customer support software systems that fully integrate with service dispatch allow reps to be more efficiently assigned. The same is the case with inventory management software that allows agents to confirm if repair parts are in stock or not.
  • Improved Infrastructure Scalability: Customer support software can handle simple problems, and it can let customers with more complex problems get in contact with an agent. This allows a growing business to boost its productivity and support growth. 
  • Reduced Time for Troubleshooting: The best customer support software reduces the amount of time an agent takes to solve the problem of a customer. Thus, the same number of CSRs can address more customer issues, or the same number of tickets can be handled by a smaller number of agents.
  • Accessibility: Customers being able to access your business is a huge factor while trying to provide the best possible customer experience. Offering a live chat option on your website is another much-needed factor. This boosts customer engagement and brand reputation.
  • Lower Operational Costs: By using customer support software, businesses can significantly reduce the operational costs of a business. Through the software, agents and managers become more productive and capable of handling customer problems. This eliminates the need to expand customer service teams, businesses can reduce operational costs even further by combing customer support software with the SaaS model.

What to Consider While Choosing a Customer Support Software?


There’s no limit to customer support software in the market. With a simple Google search, you can find thousands of software. While there is customer support software that offers all-in-one solutions, some of these systems focus on just one or two main capabilities. To make sure that you’re choosing the right customer support software, you need to consider these factors.

  • Your Business’s Unique Needs: While choosing a customer support software, this is the first and foremost factor to consider. Large organizations with a huge team of agents will need software that offers a wide selection of features. Similarly, businesses that specialize in field services will need customer support software that offers mobile access. 
  • Usability: It’s best to choose customer support software that is easy to use by the agents. An intuitive UI ensures that customer support agents can work productively. This also allows agents to help customers in a better and more effective way. 
  • Collaborative Features: Customer support features that offer collaborative capabilities can be extremely beneficial. These features will allow agents to share customer information and exchange useful data to resort to sluggish emails. Through these capabilities, the software also facilitates regular communication within teams to build a healthier workplace culture. 
  • Integrations: It’s also important that the customer support software that you choose works well with the one you’re already using. This allows agents to save time by not having to switch between different applications and focus on solving customer problems. Any customer support software that can be integrated with social media platforms can allow agents to access and respond to complaints that come from social media.
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