Top 8 Tools To Improve Customer Support in 2020
Customers are the lifeline of any business - big or small. That's why every organization today is working hard to acquire as many customers as it possibly can. But is that enough? Absolutely not.
With competition getting fiercer with every passing day, it's time for firms to look beyond widening their customer base. The need of the hour is to channelize their efforts towards retaining the acquired customers, which can turn out to be more beneficial in the long run.
This is where the customer support function comes in handy. Though most businesses don't realize it, this function plays a critical role in sustaining their connection with customers. Companies that provide good support services are able to provide customers with pleasant experiences that keep them coming back for more.
So how do you make sure that this happens? By using the right customer support tools that enhance your abilities and help you serve your customers in a better way.
In this article, we show you the best customer service tools you can use to meet the rising expectations of customers.
Here are eight tools for customer support that can help you sustain in this ever-evolving business ecosystem:
1. Strategy State
If you are a business owner, you need to keep tabs on the state of your business at all times. You need to know the strengths of your business and identify its areas of weakness. This knowledge helps you determine the course of action to take in order to propel your business towards the path of growth.
Strategy State is an affordable evaluation tool that enables you to analyze your business completely. When the evaluation is done right, devising the right strategies that bring in revenue and keeps you ahead of the competition becomes a lot easier. Knowing what is right and what's wrong, gives you an edge, when it comes to bringing an overall improvement in your business, or serving your customers in a better way.
The tool provides you with a detailed report showing your business score, areas that require improvement, and an action plan to take your business to the next level.
Pricing - starts at $87.
2. ProProfs Knowledge Base Software
Feature-rich and powered by technology, ProProfs Knowledge Base Software is all you need to improve customer service in 2020. Its stellar features and smart settings work together to help you build an impressive self-help knowledge platform in minutes. Customers can use this platform to find answers to any questions they have about your firm, products, or services, without taking the pain to call or email your support staff.
The software is simple to use and highly customizable. It helps you on various fronts such as -
- Bringing down the incoming customer support tickets
- Reducing the workload of support staff
- Aiding support staff with ready answers that helps them serve customers in a better way
- Facilitating easy access to knowledge
Pricing: starts at $0.
3. Podium - Customer Messaging Tool
The tool comes with simple features to facilitate smooth interactions between your support staff and customers.
Using this customer support tool, you can respond to queries, schedule appointments, and even close deals without keeping customers waiting on calls. By offering customers a convenient way to contact you, Podium also helps in generating leads and turning customers into your brand advocates.
Pricing: Price provided upon request
4. Feature Upvote - Customer Feedback Tool
This is a customer support tool that enables you to capture customer feedback through simple feedback boards. The boards come with an integrated voting option to ensure you don't spend too much time preparing to gather customer feedback.
Using this tool, you can gather feedback from your team as well as customers from a single point. This makes it easy to understand what your customers and team members need and use the feedback to make improvements in your products or services. Feature Upvote is an excellent tool that helps you create feedback boards where your employees, as well as customers, can provide you relevant information, ideas, and feedback regarding your offerings.
Respondents are free to either upvote others or share their thoughts. You can then view the feedback and determine which ideas are most popular based on votes.
Pricing: $49/board/month.
5. Hootsuite - Social Media Management
With social media becoming an integral part of people's lives, many customers are using different social media platforms to request help or ask questions. Often, such customers want to get responses as fast as possible, and that's they prefer social media over anything else.
A tool like Hootsuite can be of tremendous help in serving your customers on social media. Its smooth functionality combined by the unmatched social interaction and management features it offers, Hootsuite has got you covered as far as social media management is concerned. Leverage this tool to instantly find, schedule, manage and report content on social media.
Hootsuite helps you curate content, filter conversations via keywords, hashtags, and location of customers, monitor performance, and analyze results.
Pricing: $29 every month
6. InSided - Community Forum Tool
If you know the positive impact that a community forum can bring on your customers, you must definitely invest in inSided. It's a great community forum tool that helps you provide customers with a central platform where they can share knowledge and get instant answers to any questions they have regarding your offerings.
It helps you gather customer feedback, know what they think of your product, the problems they are facing, and engage with them at a deeper level. Also, inSided combines community forum with in-app support and knowledge base, offering you a complete customer support package.
Pricing: Price provided upon request
7. LiveAgent
Chat is the easiest way to reach out to a company, as opposed to calls or emails. So, it's crucial that you have a tool in place that helps you interact directly with your customers.
LiveAgent is one such tool that can be of immense help. Besides the live chat option, it offers you a ticketing system wherein customer requests coming from different channels are consolidated on a single dashboard, helping your staff resolve issues faster.
Comprising unmatched features and designed mainly for small teams, this tool uses the gamification approach to keep your customer support game on point. Your staff can score points and get rewarded once they complete a task, which motivates them to better their performance and give their cent percent when it comes to serving customers.
The tool is very simple, easy to use, and works on both desktop and mobile devices. On the back end, businesses can create profiles for individual service reps to offer customers more personalized experiences. Businesses that use this tool can monitor chats and identify those that generate sales.
Pricing: $39/month (all features included)
8. Kustomer - Personalized Customer Interactions
This customer support tool is great for businesses that want to give customers personalized experiences. Kustomer features a timeline that consolidates customer data into a single, simple report. This makes it easy for service teams to view customer history, including details on previous interactions and purchases.
With this data, service teams can personalize their interactions with customers and give them pleasant experiences. Kustomer is also designed to pool customer messages from different communication channels into a single conversation string. This gives customers and service reps a real omnichannel experience as they have the freedom to switch from one channel to another, without worrying about missing out on any communication.
Pricing: starts with $99/user/month.
Wrapping Up
Customer expectations are constantly changing. The challenge for businesses today is how to keep up with these changes to deliver pleasant experiences to their customers.
Luckily, there are numerous customer support tools to help you keep pace with rising customer expectations. From creating a robust knowledge base and providing personalized customer interactions to evaluating business strengths and managing social media engagements, there is a tool for just about everything a business needs to keep customers happy.
When buying a customer support tool, evaluate its features to see how well it addresses your problem. Opt for a tool that is easy to use and one that offers you value for money.
