More than 95% of customers affirm that customer experience influences their loyalty to a brand.
With customer experience playing such a significant role in brand equity, you have to deliver outstanding customer service software to enhance the overall experience you offer.
Here is a look at five customer service offerings that can help you hold your customers’ hands and give them a memorable experience.
1. Freshdesk
If you are looking for a help desk tool that brings together your customer messages into one continuous thread, Freshdesk may be the right option for you.
Regardless of the channels you leverage to interact with customers, Freshdesk brings them all into one conversation for you. You’ll never lose sight of essential information when interacting with each query stream.
You can prioritize, categorize and assign customer communication using a ticket field suggester. Furthermore, the customer service support software gives you insight into each ticket’s status, so you can move a client’s cause forward regardless of which agent picks it up.
Freshdesk also uses its agent collision detection to help you avoid having several customer service personnel work on the same ticket.
When it comes to the visibility of the data across the software, Freshdesk tends to make things easy for you. You’ll get a lot of granular control over the data on display using a user-friendly dashboard.
On the security front, Freshdesk offers enterprise-grade security. Each account has a custom SSL certificate, and the service audits its networks and systems regularly.
You also have the ability to use single sign-on (SSO) scripts to authenticate user and agent credentials. That’s in addition to an IP whitelist feature.
The service offers several pricing tiers with graduating features as you go higher up the chain. Sprout is the base tier and is free but with limited services. The other toes run between $19, $45, $65, and $125 per month. If you opt to pay annually, you get a discount on every paid tier.
2. Zendesk
Zendesk is another customer support software that offers unified communication for your business. You can bring together various customer communications from several channels into one easy-to-use interface.
The service zeros in on shipping a help desk service that leans towards a marketing experience instead of a hardcore customer service only.
The beauty of Zendesk is the scaling flexibility it can offer you. Enterprises, SMBs, and startups can leverage Zendesk using specially designed plans to fit their operational scale.
Every Zendesk plan offers a basic set of services: email management, Facebook, and Twitter conversations. From there, you’d need to pay for the higher tires to incorporate phone support and chat services.
A core Zendesk strength is the ability to add internal notes to each ticket. That makes it much more effective to manage a ticket with several agents in the picture.
The service’s Explore reporting tool is a nifty feature that pulls analytics for you to dig into. You can use this data to build just about any type of report you’ll need.
Zendesk has five paid plans avoidable starting at $49 (annually), going all the way to $215 for the enterprise-level tier (discover more here). There’s a free trial for each level for prospective clients who want to check the service out first.
3. JIRA
One critical function that customer service helps you accomplish is uncovering existing pain points. As you troubleshoot for your clients, you eventually notice a pattern with your product or service.
When you take the initiative to plug into that service by being the voice of the customer, it holds the potential for outsize gains. Using JIRA, you can incorporate that element into your customer service function.
JIRA helps you report bugs and feature requests coming down the pipeline from customer service. Both developers and agents can add comments to a report and receive an alert if there are any changes.
You can get a free tier for up to 10 users, and paid tiers start from $7 to $14. Enterprise customers will have to contact the developer for a pricing plan.
4. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is one of the longest-serving software solutions for social media management that lends itself to medium and large-scale businesses.
The software is especially good at blending social media management with data, which powers its features.
For example, you can build a chatbot to automate some repetitive conversations with users. When handling customer issues that aren’t complex, this is a much faster and more elegant solution than the vulnerable FAQ section.
You deploy social listening, which comes in handy when interacting with users via social media channels. You can also identify influencers using Sprout Social to leverage them in growing your brand. Additionally, you can also handle some social media-facing customer relationship management.
Businesses can take advantage of a fully functioning 30-day free trial to experiment with the service. Beyond that, there are three paid plans at $99, $149, and $249, all billed monthly and per user.
5. Intercom
Intercom is an option to evaluate for businesses that want to dig deeper in automating their support function. With Intercom, you can set up a real-time chat function and messenger bots on your website, mobile app, and product.
That can help you collect, assess, and direct customer queries correctly, so you optimize your customer service agents. The service can also give you a leg up if you want to be proactive and deliver quick tips and other information that enhances the user experience.
Intercom works well for enterprise-level, small businesses, and early-stage firms. The pricing plans are split into two broad categories for very small businesses and most other firms.
The Conversational support plan starts at $38 per month, while the more feature-rich plan begins at $87 per month. To get the custom bots, you’ll need to sign up for the $99 per month plan.
The Right Customer Service Software Makes a Difference
While customer service and support are different, they are invariably intertwined. To get clients to love your product more, deliver exceptional support using suitable customer service software. In turn, you’ll add value to the overall customer experience, which increases brand loyalty for long-term gains.
Nothing happens until you sell something. Our website provides valuable insights, ideas, and tips to help you wow customers. Check out more of our material today to discover how your customer service can become more effective.
