.jpg)
If you want to change and improve your company and business relationships with clients, you will employ customer support software. Customers wish for quick responses.
According to Gartner's research, “89% of companies now expect to compete mostly based on customer experience.”
Using email to answer customer issues and tracking them on a spreadsheet may be cheap, but you risk losing customers if they get angry because you missed their email. So again, it is the small things that matter. From refunds to defective products across channels such as email, telephone, live chat, and social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram, it gets hectic to track all these channels independently.
What Is Customer Support Software?
Customer support software is a tool that unifies multiple channels into a single platform to help businesses in the management, organization and tracking of customer queries and concerns. It also stores all information relevant to customer service, which can come up with valuable business insights. This is all done to ensure a smooth and effective customer service experience.
Types Of Customer Support Software
In a study by HDI, an association of technical support professionals, a support center is most commonly referred to as a service desk (36%) or a help desk (23%). Both support channels, however, focus on providing technical assistance, either to customers or employees. Specifically, the help desk handles break-fix cases, for example, computer crashes. At the same time, the service desk addresses break-fix issues and accommodates tech-related requests like a new computer.
1. Help desk - The help desk software is designed to answer FAQs and problem-solution cases, usually featuring a robust knowledge base of the product specs.
2. IT service desk. It also addresses the product’s technical aspects and break-fix cases like a help desk but adds another dimension: service.
3. Live chat - It can serve both the functions of the help desk and the IT service desk.
4. Call center software. Like live chat, it can be integrated with the help desk or IT service desk and an independent solution. The primary focus here is customer service through voice calls.
Features Of Customer Support Software
1. Streamlined Communication
Customers will reach out to your business using various channels depending on how comfortable they are - phone, email, social media. Therefore, good customer support software is supposed to allow for a synchronized communication portal. This gives the customers convenience and ease of interaction with the brand.
2. Reporting And Analytics
Reporting tools enable the generation of data that you can use to gauge the performance of the business and the team members when dealing with customers. Good customer support software pulls the right data points together to deliver critical insights that will help you make meaningful, well-informed decisions for your customer support.
3. Agent performance rating.
This can be a subset of analytics and reporting or a standalone tool. Specifically, the tool is used to assess an agent’s resolution time, ticket volume, conversational skills and other areas that reveal her strengths or weaknesses. The rating can also evaluate the win-loss rate for agents with overlapping sales tasks, for example, outbound calls to solicit product upgrades from current subscribers.
4. Self-Service Portal
This is the ultimate test for your customer support. This section is filled with an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) database and a knowledge base that contains other information like product specs and case studies. Customers can easily comb through these and find answers from queries of those before them.
5. Mobile Support
A mobile-ready customer service solution is a feature of modernity, and good customer support software should support mobile applications. In addition, website responsiveness should be matching mobile responsiveness.
6. Live-Chat Option
For customers, every single query is essential and should be resolved at the earliest. The online chat option is one such interaction channel that ensures quick answers and gains a lot of attention. Customer support systems cannot fulfill their purpose if they do not provide proactive chat support.
7. Ticketing
Ticket management is the backbone of customer support software. A sound support system organizes your tickets based on channel, priority, or agent. This reduces the time spent deciding which ticket needs your immediate attention, so no shared inbox anymore.
It is imperative to have the ticketing process automated to enable the system to route recurring issues to a FAQ section, thus, freeing your agents to focus on new cases. In addition, customer Support Software like MonkeyPesa allows you to integrate with email clients like Gmail or Outlook, therefore enabling a more automated tool.
Once a ticket is assigned, all conversations around it must stay in one place. Once the ticket has closed, you shouldn’t forget about it forever. Instead, look at how the ticket was solved and tag it accordingly. This feeds well into the self-service portal and building a knowledge base.