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The motto of the game is to provide quality over quantity. Companies today are pushing to go the extra mile in catering to their clients. That’s because loyal customers are less likely to leave you for a competitor and more likely to recommend you. Loyalty above all. This translates into more business for you at a lower cost in marketing.
The support you offer your customers — both before and after they buy and use your products or services — helps them have an easy and enjoyable experience with you. Even in the age of technology, the human touch in helping customers is crucial. Customer service is meeting the needs and desires of any customer.
Help desk and ticketing software help customer service representatives document, route, track, resolve and report customer issues using their service or system. This technology greatly helps with customer relations management (CRM). These solutions streamline the issue resolution process by automating many common support activities. Ultimately, they improve agent productivity and increase customer satisfaction.
Help desk software is the heartbeat of a well-run help desk and is vital for business owners. In fact, it's one of a company's top priorities whether that company is a small to midsize business (SMB) or a large organization.
Common Features of Customer Service Software
Depending on the buyer you are, and what you are looking for in dealing with your customers, there are different features in each customer service software.
Live Chat: Live chat software enables agents to solve customer issues in real-time and from wherever they already are. It makes the process comfortable as it is instant and doesn't need a physical meeting. Here, the reps can catch issues instantly during the conversation.
Analytics and Reporting: This helps reps generate custom reports on performance and customer satisfaction and help the entire organization adjust reviews.
Phone Support: A phone conversation remains a highly trusted form of addressing high stake issues. It happens in real time and helps the customer service representatives catch issues instantly. In addition, it adds a personal touch to the relationship with the customer as they know they are speaking to someone willing to listen and help.
Email Support: Do not be misled. Email communication is not dead. It is an old but highly reliable and effective form of communication. A Human Resources, Payroll, or IT team, for example, could use email to answer questions for full-and part-time employees.
Messaging Apps: The evolution of technology has led to the birth of Apps like Telegram and WhatsApp that have changed how we all communicate. These Apps are a very comfortable alternative for customers who would not favor phone calls or email.
Knowledge Base: Manages a repository of descriptions to common or previously resolved problems. These resources might be available publicly via a self-service website or reserved for internal use by CSRs.
Multi-Channel Management: Allow customer interactions received through multiple channels, including phone, Web, email, live chat, mobile app, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
The best customer service software today
1. Monkeypesa
Monkeypesa is a customer support software catering to multiple arms of your business - from sales marketing, automation and customer support. With the spirit of helping small and medium enterprises grow and thrive in business, Monkeypesa is a user-friendly tool. The pricing, features, analytics, easy to interpret dashboard makes it simpler for the users.
MonkeyPesa Features:
Team collaboration
360-degree view of customers
Livechat software
Ticket routing
API
Automation
Community forums
Self-service portal
Insights, analytics and reports
Human Resource and payroll
Live Chat
Bulk SMS and email management
Monkeypesa has a live-chat portal that allows customers to interact with a customer service agent right from the company's website. Clients use this chat-enabled service to reach out to the company for inquiries. The service is pertinent for businesses and companies relying heavily on their websites for traffic and customers.
It is important to note that clients do not want to be stranded for long waiting for replies. Therefore, employ a large team or use multiple software such as chatbots to automate some chat interactions. Live chat software enables agents to solve customer issues in real-time and from wherever they already are. It makes the process comfortable as it is instant and doesn't need a physical meeting. Here, the reps can catch issues instantly during the conversation.
Email management is another crucial aspect of MonkeyPesa customer support software. Email interactions are notorious for being slow, especially if few monitoring agents and a high volume of emails daily. Customers may need a response faster than some email service strategies can provide, especially when the conversation requires more than an initial email and a reply.
Any capable customer service team should possess a central and accessible knowledge base to simplify simple inquiries. MonkeyPesa lets you build a knowledge base backed up by well-written articles for customers to peruse through searching for answers. Without the articles, there is no knowledge base. A knowledge base is the end product of collecting and organizing that information into a usable form. This feeds directly into the 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.
Social Media is a very relevant tool of sales and marketing today. Every passing day, there is a new social media channel your clients and prospects sign up for. MonkeyPesa provides a centralized location for all your social media interactions — tweets, posts, reels, videos, comments, replies, Direct Messages. Accessible Communication is a giant step into maintaining good relationships with clients. Strong relationships generate more sales and support, improve client satisfaction, and can even reduce business expenses.
2. Zoho Desk
Zoho is one of the most popular names in the world of business software and CRM. They offer sales, marketing, email, collaboration, finance, accounting, human resources, and business intelligence.
But one of the best solutions they offer is Zoho Desk—IT and help desk software.
Zoho Desk has solutions for customer service agents, managers, and customers. But above all, it’s arguably the best customer service software for managing and closing tickets.
3. Live Agent
LiveAgent is a great Hubspot Service Hub alternative for small and medium-sized e-commerce, telecom, and SaaS businesses that want to offer great customer service on a budget. This fully-featured help desk software helps you bring personalization to your customer interactions.
The best part about this tool is that it lets you combine all your communication channels like email, live chat, calls, and social media into a shared company inbox.
LiveAgent harnesses the power of an omnichannel universal inbox, real-time live chat, built-in call center, and a robust customer service portal. Personalize your communication by leveraging our customer segmentation, automation, built-in CRM, a powerful analytics package, and our customer knowledge base. Discover over 175+ help desk features and 40+ integrations.
4. Fresh Desk
FreshDesk is suitable for businesses of all types and sizes. Its simple UI and straightforward features make it a popular choice with startups. In addition, the platform enables you to provide customer service across all social platforms with built-in AI and self-service capabilities.
Freshdesk converts requests coming in via email, web, phone, chat, and social into tickets and unifies ticket resolution across channels. Additionally, Freshdesk lets you automate workflows, provide self-service, manage SLAs, and measure metrics so that you can stay on top of all things customer support. Freshdesk also offers out-of-the-box features like an AI-powered support chatbot, predictive support capabilities, and field service management.
It's simple and easy to use. That’s why it’s trusted by 150,000+ businesses, including American Express, HP, Hugo Boss, Toshiba, Cisco, Honda, The Atlantic, QuizUp, and Panasonic.
5. Hubspot
HubSpot is one of the most well-recognized CRMs in the industry. They have a wide range of software and solution suites for managing relationships with customers.
These offerings are segmented into three main categories: sales, marketing, and service.
The HubSpot Service Hub is an exceptional solution for managing customer issues through service tickets. The best part: they offer free CRM solutions, including software for customer service.
Free features include ticketing, live chat, chatbots, team email, and a conversations inbox. You’ll also benefit from free email templates, closed ticket reports, and time-to-close reports.
HubSpot is proof that you don’t need to spend much money improving your customer service with software. After all, this won’t cost you a thing.
For those of you who want access to advanced features and benefits, here’s an overview of the paid plans:
Starter — $40 per month
Includes two paid users
Canned snippets
Meeting scheduling
Agent productivity reports
Calling
Professional — $320 per month
Includes five paid users
Ticket status, routing, automation, and pipelines
Knowledge base
1:1 video creation
Custom reporting
Surveys for NPS, experience, and support
Enterprise — $1,200 per month
Includes ten paid users
Playbooks and goals
Hierarchical teams
User roles
Single sign-on
Integrates with Slack
All rates are based on an annual contract.
6. Agile CRM
Agile CRM provides superior customer service and maintains satisfied customers over the long term. Agile CRM enables businesses to provide a more personalized customer support experience. With a host of powerful help desk automation features at your fingertips, you will better understand your customers so you can be there to assist when they need you most.
7. Jira Service Desk
Jira Service Desk (starting at a $10 flat monthly rate for one to three agents) holds significant open-source street cred since multiple well-known open-source projects use it as their primary software development issue tracking tool. That makes it a key component in managing software bugs and their eventual disposition, a task for which this platform is also used in many commercial enterprises.
Read - Jira Service Desk review.
Jira Service Desk offers a bulk user importing tool that uses a simple CSV file for larger installations. The website's administration page also links to other admin functions such as managing groups and application access. Finally, if you're looking for plug-ins to extend functionality further, the Atlassian Marketplace presents 2,500 ready-made extensions ranging from an enterprise mail handler to connectors to Salesforce, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics.
One of the benefits of Jira Service Desk is its progressive pricing model. The more agents you have, the cheaper it costs per agent.
For example, 100 agents cost $15.75 per agent per month. But 1,000 agents cost just $5.33 per agent. This pricing structure is ideal for large organizations.
In addition to the cloud version of Jira Service Desk, you can deploy this software directly on your self-managed server or data center.
Try Jira Service Desk free for 7 days.
8. Cayzu
More than 20,000 businesses trust Cayzu for helpdesk software. This is arguably the most simple helpdesk solution on the market today for agents and customers alike.
Cayzu provides helpdesk software to small businesses, ecommerce websites, schools, MSPs, and nonprofits.
With prices starting as low as $4 per month, you won’t find a cheaper deal from a legitimate provider in this industry.
The Basic plan is exactly what it sounds like. It offers the bare minimum required to run your helpdesk solution.
These low-level plans won’t accommodate the needs of large organizations or businesses with complex ticketing systems. But, with that said, smaller businesses tend to find simplicity refreshing. The software is cheap but still gets the job done.
All plans are cloud-based, so there’s no installation required. You can access Cayzu from anywhere, including the mobile app. You’ll also benefit from unlimited support, free app integrations, and automatic backups. Try Cayzu free for 14 days.
9. Zendesk
Zendesk’s customer service software empowers businesses to build effortless customer experiences. As a result, conversations flow seamlessly across channels, leading to greater productivity and satisfaction all around.
The Agent Workspace within Zendesk’s Suite equips agents with all the tools they need to collaborate, other teams, and deliver fast, personalized responses on any channel—from a single, unified interface.
Zendesk gives you the tools you need to manage omnichannel customer service. You can provide customer support via email, live chat, voice, Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, WhatsApp, and more.
Professional Support Suite — $89 per agent per month
Omnichannel support
Social messaging add-on
Self-service knowledge base
Dashboards and reporting for all channels
Talk partner edition
Multiple ticket forms
Enterprise Support Suite — $149 per agent per month
Roles and permissions with skilled base routing
Multi-brand support
Chat widget and web SDK
Content cues to identify knowledge gaps
24/7 live chat and phone support
