“We need more efficient tools for customer support. The entire team is doing their best to keep our customers satisfied. But without the right customer support tools, it’s impossible to achieve our customer retention targets.” – Sincerely, a customer success manager.
Customer support is not similar to operations, strategizing, finance, or marketing functions. But it sure is crucial for any business to thrive in this fast-changing world. Why? Add loyal customers to this list, and you’re well on your way to achieving all the growth targets.
This is exactly where the customer support function comes in because this business function works towards improving customer experience day in and day out without being transactional with them. And if the customers are getting the best possible experience, why won’t they be loyal to your brand?
Before that, let’s start with the basics.
What is a Customer Support Tool?
A Customer Support Tool is a software or platform that assists businesses in managing interactions with customers, handling inquiries, resolving issues, and ensuring a positive customer experience. It often includes features like ticketing systems, live chat, knowledge bases, and analytics to improve and streamline customer service operations.
How does customer Service Software Function?
Fundamentally, customer service software aids companies in enhancing their customer service delivery by centralizing customer dialogues and data from various channels and systems into one unified platform.
Why are Customer Support Tools essential for small enterprises?
Small enterprises require customer service applications to categorize, prioritize, and amalgamate customer service requests. When utilized effectively, these applications facilitate swifter, more dependable, and more tailored responses to customer inquiries, enabling small businesses to distinguish themselves through exemplary customer service.
10 Customer Support Tools of 2024!
Selecting the right customer support tool has become more important than ever. Here’s our curated list of the top 10 tools for customer support and service in 2023.
1. SurveySparrow’s Customer Pulse Surveys
Your customer support team needs loads of customer data to serve and support them aptly. But they need time, too! Time to process all the data and determine whether the products and services satisfy your customers.
SurveySparrow’s Customer Support software help you solve this problem. You can conduct product, website, and customer feedback surveys along with NPS and customer exit surveys from here. Every one of these surveys understands customers in the best possible manner. And you get an option to try it for free by just signing up.
Some other benefits that you’ll get from this efficient customer support tool are:
- Raise customer support tickets with SurveySparrow’s support ticketing system.
- Resolve customer queries and close the feedback loop.
- Option to station feedback units all along the customer journey to measure their experience.
- Easily build your ideal customer persona from the feedback and data collected.
- Stay in touch with your customer at every touchpoint and boost retention.
- Shape your products and offerings in tune with every customer’s requirements and expectations.
Pricing:
- For surveys, the Basic plan starts at $19/month for personal use. The Essentials plan at $49/month is designed for small teams.
- The Business plan at $99/month suits mid-sized businesses, while the Enterprise plan is for large organizations.
- Under NPS + CX Suite, the CX Basic plan is priced at $199/month, with customizable options available.
- There’s also a Forever Free plan with limited features and a free trial for testing the product. Sign up below to try it out.
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2. EngageBay’s All-in-one suite
This is one of the best all-in-one customer support tools you’ll find in 2021. We’re impressed by its suite that acts as your customer service center, a CRM, and also like a sales and marketing suite. So, your customer support team can manage the whole customer data, keep track of the services and support offered to every one of them, and share all the data readily with the sales and marketing teams, enabling them to make informed decisions.
Customers love EngageBay because of this interconnectivity, as it relieves them from all the hassles of collecting, managing, and transferring data. So, if you go with this tool for your customer support team, they’ll be relieved of all this daily work.
Just imagine how well and efficiently they could use this time to deliver stupendous and unexpected results!
Other benefits that you’ll get from this all-action suite are:
- You get a SaaS call center that makes it easy for you to shift call solutions and analytics to the cloud. So, you don’t need many people to attend calls, nor do you need to outsource the entire call-answering process.
- Great live chat support to fasten the process of customer interaction.
- Personalized email automation that can be sent upon specific triggers.
- Real quick customer support for even your smallest of queries.
Pricing: $47.99 per user per month for this complete suite of solutions.
3. Freshwork’s Cloud-Based Solution
Freshwork’s cloud-based solution is one of the most sought-after tools for customer support you can use. The primary reason for that is the simplicity in its UI and straightforward features that are easy to use and access.
You can upgrade your customer support tool stack with Freshworks – your customer support team would get automated ticketing mechanisms, shared team inboxes, social customer support, knowledge bases, and community forums. The best part is that you’ll get all this and many customer-oriented solutions at a very affordable price.
Before Freshworks, organizations were spending hundreds of dollars every month on 3-4 different tools, and integrating them into a single CRM was a big problem. This ultimately used to hamper their decision-making. It’s not the case anymore, as FreshDesk has solved this problem well and truly.
Some other benefits that you will get from this customer support software are:
- This cloud-based solution offers integrated time-tracking functionality that helps identify bottlenecks hampering support operations.
- It follows the gamification trend, which rewards each agent (they sign every team member as an agent in Freshworks) with points for each ticket solved successfully and on time.
- This cloud solution is available on Android, iOS, Windows, and Blackberry platforms. So, your team can support and service customers from every platform!
- It offers high customizability, as businesses can set up the support portal to suit their brand by adding logos, bringing in colors, and adding other customizations from various options available.
Pricing: They set the pricing at $15 per agent per month after keeping small businesses and startups in mind. A free trial is also available for this solution.
4. Intercom’s Live Chat Widgets
“I want our customers to get help right where they need it. They shouldn’t need to navigate to our site to receive support.”
If that’s how you want your customer support team to serve your customers, Intercom is the answer. Because Intercom enables you to install chat widgets on your website, app, and even in your product, this way, your customers can get their queries resolved right where they’re facing them.
Intercom’s live chat widget saves a lot of time for both your customers and the customer support team. And when you’re looking to achieve the growth targets, using all the time productively becomes crucial.
This mobile-friendly customer support tool even provides guided product tours to help your customers get a deeper understanding of the product. Isn’t that amazing?
Other top benefits that you’ll get by using Intercom for your customer support functions are:
- Extremely user-friendly chat interface.
- Saved responses from past conversations that help you streamline communication with each one of your customers.
- Intercom allows you to import all the stored customer data and keep it in sync with the help of simple integration.
- It also allows you and your team to import statistics, like the last contact date and the number of open-and-close conversations.
Pricing: $87 per month. It might look expensive, but believe us, it’s worth every penny!
5. ConnectWise Control’s Remote Support
Remote support! Yes, remote support is very much possible in 2021, thanks to ConnectWise Control. At present, it is one of the most highly regarded customer support tool because of its remote support feature. The way it works is, it lets your team members take control of your customer’s device regardless of their location and allows the team to solve their queries directly. This tool and its remote support function are highly secure, fast, and reliable.
ConnectWise made it to our list because we’ve observed that technical issues faced by your customers are tough to solve if the team is not seeing the issue themselves. So, instead of spending a good lot of time trying to understand the problem, why not take this route and solve the problem swiftly and quickly?
Some other amazing benefits of this tool are:
- Your team gets an array of in-team help for faster solving.
- This tool gives you the option of automated reconnection. So, you can provide great customer support and solve issues even when the network is not favorable.
- It lets you adjust the logos and the language in which you provide service.
- When connected to your customer’s machine, ConnectWise works towards giving the most flexible solution suitable to them.
Pricing: The pro plan comes for $45 per month. And there’s a free trial for you to explore as well.
6. Atera’s Powerful IT Solutions
Atera is an all-in-one powerfully managed IT solution customer support tool that helps teams in professional service automation (PSA) and remote monitoring and management (RMM).
This amazing tool also provides integrated cloud and remote access tools that are primarily suited for small and mid-sized businesses. Atera’s solutions offer rapid onboarding and an impressive user experience.
The top benefits of this tool are:
- Atera’s monitoring solutions help to identify the problem areas in your customer journey before it impacts your business negatively.
- It employs many security features like a mail shield, file blocking, and a mail trace.
- Highly advanced analytics to track your team’s performance.
- Your team can remotely control servers and workstations with Atera’s IT solutions.
Pricing: It starts at $79 per member per month, and there’s also a free trial available.
7. Zingtree’s Interactive Troubleshooters
Zingtree is one of those customer support tools that makes it easy to create, customize, and deploy interactive scripts for your customer support team’s calling and answering functions.
It is a powerful decision tool that learns from your past activities to provide solutions for future customer interactions.
The Zingtree tool would benefit your team in these other ways:
- Improves productivity massively.
- It can be easily integrated with CRM and cloud solutions like EngageBay and FreshDesk.
- A great tool used for customer support training.
- It is a very easy to use and clean design.
Pricing: $15 per team member per month with a free trial available.
8. Grammarly’s Grammar Support
This might be one of the most used yet the most underrated tools that are used by businesses and teams globally. Why do we say that? Because people don’t realize how badly spelling mistakes and poor grammar affect their business.
But they still use Grammarly to make their emails error-free! It might sound harsh, but your customers would form an opinion about your company based on the emails and replies to them. And that’s why you don’t want to make any mistakes here.
Let’s see the top benefits of a powerful tool like Grammarly:
- Your team can integrate it into many systems and documents. Be it email or Google Docs.
- With Grammarly, your team can tune their replies in American, British, Canadian, and Australian English.
- If you’re using canned replies, upload them on Grammarly for a quick check.
- A tremendous amount of time that goes into proofreading scripts and emails gets saved with this tool.
Pricing: Grammarly gives free basic writing support. And you can get the premium features at $12.50 per monthly member.
9. Whereby’s Video Conferencing Tool
With Whereby, your team can take their customer support game higher by directly providing live video support from the website itself! It’s absolutely easy to use. So, even non-tech members of your customer support team can use it.
Whereby surely is one of the most exciting digital customer support tools you can use right now.
Some more benefits of Whereby are:
- Your customer support lead can easily host meetings with Whereby by creating a room and then sharing the links with the teammates.
- Its recording feature lets you create webinars.
- Your team members can go live instantly and can solve customer queries in far-less time.
- It also comes with a Meetings API, that is used to add a video meeting to your website.
Pricing: It’s free for one meeting room and up to four participants. After this, it costs $59.99 per month for a business plan subscription.
10. Kontentino’s Social Media Management & Analytics
For supporting customers and providing them with an exceptional experience, social media plays a huge role. And by social media, we don’t just mean social media posting and engagement, but analyzing and generating reports that can lead to better decision making.
With Kontentino, your customer support team can do all of that. It’s one of those tools for customer support that lets you know about the customers on a more personal level. Your team gets to understand their choices, likes, and dislikes, which ultimately helps in making better-informed decisions.
And given how expensive gaining new customers has become, the importance of this tool just can’t be ignored.
Here are some more benefits of Kontentino:
- You can easily schedule posts and other content material with this tool.
- Kontentino gives you the option of multiple content approvals and a post-requirement checklist.
- It also gives a content approval feature, where you can directly send some content pieces for your customer’s approval.
- This tool gives you the option of integration with FB Ads Manager and a direct scheduling and posting option for LinkedIn. A complete social media tool, isn’t it?
Pricing: Kontentino comes with a free 30-day trial post. The price is $49 per three users per month for ten social profiles after that.
What are the Benefits of Using a Customer Support Tool?
Utilizing a Customer Support Tool is a strategic move for any business looking to enhance its service delivery and foster stronger customer relationships. These tools streamline handling customer inquiries and issues, ensuring a smooth and satisfactory customer experience. Here are five core benefits:
- Efficiency and Productivity: By automating routine tasks and organizing customer inquiries, these tools help in significantly improve the efficiency and productivity of customer support teams.
- Centralized Communication: They centralize all customer communications from various channels into a single platform, ensuring no inquiries are missed and providing a unified view of customer interactions.
- Improved Response Time: With better organization and automation, customer support tools help reduce response times, enhancing customer satisfaction.
- Knowledge Base Creation: They aid in creating and maintaining a knowledge base, enabling customers to find answers to common questions independently.
- Analytical Insights: These tools provide valuable data and insights on customer satisfaction and support performance, helping in identifying areas for improvement and making informed decisions
Customer Support: The Right Way
Here’s a catch, though. The customer support department can’t succeed and deliver results without the right tools. Because without that, every member of your customer support team would race against time to satisfy all the customers. Yes, that’s the truth. There are different functions handled by the customer support department, from solving technical problems to documenting everything and giving product feedback. Doing all that manually is a big no-no.
Choosing the right tools, though, can do wonders, which is exactly why we’ve come up with this blog. Here, we’ve listed the top 10 customer support tools for 2021 and beyond based on business needs, features, usability, and pricing. Using these tools would make your customer support team’s lives easier, and they would have the time and energy to surprise you with the results!
Final Thoughts.
Your customers have become smart. They know exactly what they want and what would make them happy. They already have expectations from you, your products, and your teams. So, your team’s job, especially your customer support team’s, is to fulfill those expectations and satisfy them with their service and support.
These 10 tools would help them do just that. Each of these tools solves a different customer support function and saves a vast amount of time, energy, and resources along the way.
Every business has its own separate needs. So, choose tools from this list that best suit your company and start fully using them as soon as possible.
Customer support can be a highly demanding business function, but your team will surely get a tremendous boost with these tools! So, we hope you make the right picks and achieve all the set targets. And if you find any better tools for customer support, write about it to us. We would love to try it out ourselves.
Overwhelmed with Options? Pinpoint the Right Tool Now!
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