Offering customer service par excellence is the top priority of leading businesses now!
87% of senior business leaders in the US and UK see CX as their top-growth engine, but only 1 in 3 feel prepared to address it. (North Highland , via Consulting.us)
This post aims at arming CX teams and leaders with the top 6 customer service tools to help them easily make as many happy customers as they desire.
Here Are The Must-have Customer Service Tools
Here are the classic customer service tools you absolutely need:
1. Call Center System
The ability to answer people’s queries and concerns is essential to all businesses, regardless of their size and type. However, if you are a growing business or want to empower call center executives, you need a call center system.
Quite simply, a call center system brings automation to the way you handle inbound calls and also the way you generate leads by outreach.
Benefits
- You don’t need to spend time having multiple agents on board, 24/7
- Removes the workload of the customer service agents
- Acknowledges customers’ or visitors’ queries without a live agent
Features
- Integration with CRM software
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
- Intelligent Call Routing
- Voice and Email Transcription
- Real-time and Historical Reporting
Recommendation: Zendesk
2. Live Chat
Live chat has become increasingly popular with customers because it’s immediate and can solve their problems fast and the benefits are reflected in companies’ bottom line. Here’s proof:
79% of businesses say offering live chat has positively affected sales, revenue, and customer loyalty. (Kayako )
Customers who use live chat are 2.8x more likely to convert than those who do not use live chat support. (WhosOn )
Benefits
- Adds a human touch to digital conversations
- Helps develop deeper trust and better customer relationships
- Faster sales
- Increased opportunities for agents to upsell and cross-sell
Features
- Integration with other CX apps
- Video call
- Co-browsing
- Screen-sharing
Recommendation: Intercom
3. Help Desk Ticketing System
A help desk ticketing software takes care of your customers and visitors round-the-clock. It allows you not to miss a lead or disappoint them without a response due to the absence of a live agent.
An efficient IT ticketing system helps you with your retention and acquisition efforts by automatically generating tickets for visitor queries and customer complaints.
Benefits
- Reduces First Response Times (FRTs) to a bare minimum by acknowledging all customers and visitors by sending tickets as soon as they reach out
- Increased collaboration between agents
- Faster query resolution and reducing query backlogs
Features
- Omnichannel Integration
- Ticketing software automatically tags, categorize and route service tickets.
- Skill-based routing to agents
- Queuing up tickets on a first-come, first-served basis and using automated assignment models like round robin and load balancing manage requests.
- Priority-based business rules to ticket assignments.
Recommendation: Zendesk
4. Social Media Listening and Monitoring Tool
Social media listening tools’ biggest offering is sentiment analysis. Here, all your brand mentions across social platforms are tracked and displayed to you, and their nature, whether positive, negative, or neutral, is analyzed.
When you know the customer sentiment around your brand, you can proactively reach out to them and increase the chances of conversion.
Benefits
- Always in the know of what people are thinking of your brand
- Better control over your brand image
- More opportunities to connect with customers at the right time
- Prevent PR disasters
- Better social media traction
Features
- Sentiment Analysis
- Detailed Report Generation
- Post Scheduling
- Campaign Optimization
- Follower Analysis
- Competitor Analysis
Recommendation: Sprout Social
5. Self-service Knowledge Base Software
A knowledge base software can help you gather content regarding your products and services sprawled across the internet. It can also help you create articles efficiently and translate them into multiple languages.
A comprehensive self-service knowledge base can help your customers and service agents quickly access literature on your products and services. This literature could be a list of FAQs, guides, white papers, how-tos, use cases, and case studies.
Benefits
- Customers trust the written word more than the spoken word
- Less burden on your customer support staff
- You can gain vital customer information on what questions and queries they ask most, and which one’s they don’t
Features
- Easy integration, plug into live chat and chatbots
- Sort and manage your articles
- Tweak articles in bulk
- Automated responses
Recommendation: HelpScout
6. Conversational Chatbots
Over 50% of customers expect a business to be available 24/7. (Oracle)
But imagine running a call center for 24 hours nonstop where you acknowledge all the visitors, try to convert them, and store their data.
Sounds costly, doesn’t it? You will have to run operations 24/7, with agents coming in and out in shifts.
Chatbots can do this for you!
Chatbots automatically answer customer FAQs. Driven by AI and ML, they learn from customers’ language and offer personalized communication, increasing the humanness in the conversation sans a human. For complex queries, they can generate a ticket (by integrating help desk ticketing software) and route it to an agent when they come online.
They help you offer excellent customer service and experience 24 hours a day .
Benefits
- 24/7 Customer Service
- Reduced FRTs
- Agents don’t have to indulge in menial, repeating conversations
Features
- Easy integrations
- Customized interactions
- ML-based smart communication
- Deployment with plug-and-play ease
- Multilingual conversations
- Skill-based Routing
Recommendation: Tidio
Conclusion
One of the world’s biggest enterprises – Amazon, prides itself on being people-centric. For global leaders, customer happiness is the most important KPI. Now it’s your turn to join the league if you haven’t already. Investing in customer service tools is a must if you want to increase customer retention and lifetime value and boost sales and ROI.
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