Did you know that 81% of consumers say a positive customer service experience increases their likelihood of buying from you again? If your brand isn’t known for having happy, satisfied customers, it will be difficult to get repeat customers or to attract new ones. Bad customer service will have drastic effects on your Customer Lifetime Value and customer satisfaction.
Customer service software enables your business to collect, manage, and solve customer service inquiries so your business can better understand the voice of the customer and provide offerings and an experience to meet their needs.
In this article, we’ll answer the question, “what is customer service software” and help you get started implementing your customer support solution.
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What is customer service software?
Customer service software helps you collect, manage, and address service requests from a central location. In addition to providing quick resolutions for customer issues, the goal of customer service software is to understand the voice of your customer better. You can use feedback from these customer conversations to inform business decisions that’ll increase customer satisfaction and subsequently, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and company growth..
Types of customer service software
Customer service software usually includes one or more ways customers can seek support. When possible, look for a support software system that provides multiple communication channels, including any or all of the following:
Phone support
Some customers want to pick up the phone and speak to someone. For phone support to be effective, use it in conjunction with other customer service software or support, including:
- Self-Service options: An automated welcome or on-hold messaging that addresses common support queries, such as announcing opening hours, address, or any other common FAQs people contact you about.
- Call routing: Automated prompts where the customer can clarify their support query so their call can be directed to the correct department.
- Customer Relationship Management software: Before a customer support rep picks up the call, they should have immediate access to the customer CRM record to provide more personalized service.
Automation
Including automation in your customer service software solutions will help your business more easily scale. Automation can include:
- Chatbots that use AI and keyword analysis to guess what the customer is looking for and provide them with a link to the exact resource they need to solve their problem.
- Email replies are sent to customers upon emailing specific email addresses. You would likely have several automated replies depending on the customer-supplied reason for contacting you.
- Automated feedback surveys can be sent to every customer after engaging in a customer support call or who purchases a product. These can be automated to collect valuable feedback as soon as possible after their interaction or conversation with your company.
Messaging and Chat
Many customers want to engage with you through instant messaging or live chat software. Customer support software that supports messaging apps will allow your agents to provide live support. You can also combine your messaging app with an automated AI-powered chatbot to filter support requests and attempt to answer them through a self-service solution (like directing the customer to a knowledge base article) before a customer support agent enters the conversation.
CRM
Good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is vital to collecting, tracking, and following up with leads as your business grows. It can also act as a customer record-keeping system, tracking their purchases, customer conversations, and customer demographics and preferences.
A CRM should be easily accessible by all customer service agents, so they can call up a client record when they engage with your company. These records can help your support agents provide more personalized service to your customers because they have the customer’s information in front of them.
Self-Service Software
Often, you can solve most customer issues by sending them a specific resource or website link. For these types of queries, or for those who prefer to look for the answer themselves before engaging with your business, self-service portals provide a time-saving customer support service. Self-service portals can include:
- Knowledge base
- Blog content
- FAQ page
- Video tutorial libraries
- Chatbot messaging
Why businesses need customer service software
Customer service software is essential for businesses that value using customer feedback to improve business operations and offerings. Here are the benefits of using customer support software:
Improve internal communications
Any customer-facing team members can access customer records and pick up where a previous support rep left off if needed.
Support goal achievement
You can use data obtained by customer support software to measure customer satisfaction, ease of issue resolution, and overall customer sentiments.
Identify patterns
With centralized customer service tools, you can more easily identify patterns in customer complaints and queries so you can inform business decisions to meet your customer’s needs better. When using machine learning in your customer service solution, the AI can uncover these patterns in real-time so you can rectify them immediately.
Better lead nurturing and upselling
A good customer support system centralizes all customer data so you can better nurture leads. It helps you to show them the content they need for their stage of the customer journey, and sales and support reps can provide a more personalized experience. You can also more effectively upsell based on customer-supplied data and their conversations or interactions with your assets (like website browsing and app usage).
Improve customer satisfaction and sentiment
When you can quickly solve a customer’s query without causing confusion or frustration, you’re improving the customer experience. The best customer service software will prompt customers for feedback on every conversation they have with your teams, and you can use this to measure customer satisfaction.
Read more about the most useful customer service solutions.
Best practices for choosing the right customer service software
Not all customer service software is the same. You’ll want to choose one (or multiple) based on your business’s needs and capabilities. You’ll likely need more than one tool or a platform that encompasses or collects many customer interactions.
Here are some tips for choosing the best customer support software:
Acts as a hub
Choose a customer support platform that integrates with other third party software and systems you already use. The goal is to select a customer support software that acts as a hub: one place to store and internally access your customer conversations. if you use other tools (such as email marketing software, customer relationship management systems, and e-commerce platforms), ensure they can share data for a more complete picture of your customer and business.
Easy to use
You may get a robust customer service software solution, but if it’s not easy to use or requires too much manual, ongoing maintenance or configuration, it’s not going to be helpful to use.
Uses machine learning when possible
Customer data comes from many places and in different formats. While you can assign the entire marketing or analytics department staff to manually collect and analyze customer information data, that’s time-consuming and leaves room for human error. It also misses out on significant trends in real-time. A machine learning driven tool can gather information from your data sources and analyze it quickly, helping you stay on top of emerging issues and trends affecting customer satisfaction.
Learn more about using Idiomatic to help measure customer satisfaction.
What software is used for customer service support?
You have many options for your customer support solution. Here are some that your customer support team may find helpful in collecting, managing, or actioning on customer requests:
Idiomatic:
Idiomatic is an AI-driven customer intelligence platform that acts as a hub to analyze customer feedback data collected from other customer support tools. It uses this data to unlock the most valuable insights to better understand the voice of your customer.
Zendesk:
Zendesk helps your customer support teams manage conversations across multiple channels.
Salesforce:
Salesforce is designed for businesses with automation, an integrated help desk solution, and customer support tickets which connect to its CRM software.
Gorgias:
This platform automates customer support directly in your e-commerce website and provides your customer support teams with a holistic view of customer data to provide fast, personalized help.
Qualtrics:
Qualtrics excels at intelligent workflows and automation triggers and processes, so customer queries get where they need to be quickly and accurately.
Delighted:
This software collects different data types (NPS, CSAT, PMF, eNPS, CES, and more) to provide high-level summaries of survey results.
Gladly:
Gladly helps you become more customer-centric to build brand loyalty through messaging, chat, voice, SMS, email, and self-service tools.
Kustomer:
Kustomer helps you better manage your customers, not just support case management. They power an omnichannel experience for your customers that includes self-service support channels and AI-powered chatbots, and provides an at-a-glance CRM records for your customer support team to provide personalization at scale.
Using Idiomatic as a customer service tool
When you listen to your customers from all channels, you get a more complete and informed view of the voice of your customer. Idiomatic can take feedback from various data sources and uncover issues and trends using AI. With this deep customer knowledge, you can better position your business, brand, offerings, and customer support experience to better meet your customers’ needs.
If your business needs to be more customer-focused and is looking for a customer service platform to help you create a better customer experience, look to Idiomatic. Customers who use Idiomatic see amazing results. They can analyze 10x more customer feedback, see a 49% decrease in customer complaints, and increase product satisfaction by 250%.
Request an Idiomatic Demo today to learn how your organization can use it to provide great customer service to your customers.
