If you want your business to retain and attract more customers, you need to provide excellent customer support. In short, you need to successfully cater to your customers’ needs, show them that you care, and build strong relationships with them. These are some of the reasons why having customer support tools for your business can be advantageous.
Generally, customer support tools provide you with the power to offer accurate, personalized, and timely customer service. Such make it easier to serve your customers and prospects more effectively, which can improve retention, customer acquisition, and satisfaction.
Such tools offer a variety of functionalities. For example, some tools can be used to facilitate customer management, while others, like an auto dialer, make it simpler for you to offer phone support. Still, some tools may help you cultivate vibrant communities.
Below are some of the customer support tools that your business must use.
Automatic Callback Phone System
Several customers still want to use phones over some digital methods. You need to ensure that your business works towards providing great customer experience at all times. Besides, there’s nothing more frustrating for customers than being on hold for a certain period of time only to get disconnected. So, the best solution is to employ phone systems for your business. There are many companies you can rely on for such systems, and one of these is Call Cowboy.
An automatic callback phone system can help you bring your company to the next level. After a customer leaves their phone number, the system takes note of their place in the queue and calls them back when the support agent becomes available. With this, you’ll set your customers to avoid waiting in queues with phones stuck to their heads.
Reporting Tool
A reporting tool helps you measure, track, and analyze different customer support services. It must also bring your metrics into an interactive dashboard that you may use to make real-time decisions and track bottom line performance.
Getting overwhelmed with data, and one key to avoid this is to know what you should track and what you should do with it. With a reporting tool, it can be streamlined. You’ll get external information, such as frequent channels, support tickets opened, received requests, satisfaction, and time of day. Other than those, you’ll also get internal information, such as team member performance, average reply per resolution, resolution time, and response times. All of these can be presented through an interactive dashboard.
Remember that a customer service report is unique to your business, so it’s crucial to find the software that would help you pull in the most important data.
Live Support Chat
A live support chat tool offers an amazing opportunity for your company’s customer support agents. Using this kind of tool in your website is easy and simple. Aside from that, integrating a live support chat helps empower your agents in handling different customers at the same time, adding more to the shopping experience, and engage them once they arrive at your site while providing assistance.
Live support chat tools also come with some amazing functionalities. For example, your agents may oversee and assist other agents. You may also record and track the conversations to determine the trends and tailor your approach based on your customers’ needs.
Help Desk
Help desk software is one of the customer support tools you should have for your business. It serves as a centralized hub for your customer support.
A lot of help desk tools share similarities, but each may offer you unique benefits. When assessing your options, make sure that they include important features, like a shared inbox, which can help your team to easily collaborate with one another and resolve all the requests.
A good help desk tool also comes with a self-serve support, which enables customers to find answers to your questions or solve your product problems on their own. A feature like a reporting functionality may also be beneficial as it may help you track your customer sentiments and improve your customer service by numbers.
Ticketing System
Once the number of the tickets spikes, you’ll require all the help you can muster. If you’re not using a customer support ticketing system, you should consider having one as soon as possible. The reason behind it is that it makes ticket management much simpler.
With a ticketing system for your customer support, you may also interact with your customers across various channels. It includes email, live chat, phone, and so on. Your managers may also assign agents their tickets easily whenever it’s necessary. Other tools also come with some automated features, which can help you remove time-consuming and redundant tasks.
Self-Service Knowledge Base
Generally, a self-service knowledge base is a library curated by you and your customer support team to provide helpful information and answers. Take note that customers like to solve their own problems first as long as the process is easy and empowers them. A good knowledge base delivers this promise in a form of how-to guides, articles, illustrations, or explainer videos. Same with your customer support team, a knowledge base serves on the frontlines.
It’s easy to create a knowledge base once you’re using the right software. Features to note when selecting your knowledge base tool may include a Google-like search functionality, site-wide widgets, reporting, related content recommendations, and immediate access to your agents with just a few clicks. With such features, your knowledge will be the strongest ally of your customer support team.
Dedicated Mobile App
A good way to connect with your customers is through a dedicated mobile app. In terms of mobile apps, you must know that there aren’t any limits. You may embed your online store in them or your chat functionality, ticketing system, and customer support agent call. Generally, it’s possible to make a window of your services with the use of a mobile app.
Your customers will enjoy it. As a matter of fact, most customers rely on their smartphones whenever they shop. Moreover, some prefer using a mobile customer support app compared to other options available to them. Just see to it that you outsource your mobile app to a renowned and an established firm to get the best app that will work on various mobile devices.
Social Media Management Tool
These days, businesses have to nurture their audience online. With the fame of social media platforms, it has become more crucial. A bad experience may cost you a lot if the word spreads out on such media.
For you to take full control of your social media networks and leverage your account’s popularity, you need to consider the use of a social media management tool. This tool can help you streamline your social media communication, track or record interaction, and help you provide answers to your customers’ questions.
Community Forums
Online community software can help you provide a digital place for all your customers to connect, share their knowledge and experience about your products or services, and ask questions. Oftentimes, some businesses are fixated on how they’re communicating with customers that they don’t consider the idea of facilitating conversations among these people.
Fortunately, with community forums, customers can share their knowledge regarding your offerings, regardless if it’s a hack, review, tip, or some praises. For others, these forums provide them with some ways to access information or recommendations from others who are currently using your products.
Forums may also be a gold mine to your customer support team. You can have access to new insights and information from your customers. You may use these when developing more FAQ style content, optimizing your workflows, and providing feedback to your customer support team.
Several online forums are quite straightforward to set up. You can register an account, post in response to some users’ messages, and create threads. Just remember that forums are engagement-oriented online communities, which means that you’ll have to consider what your engagement strategy is before launching one.
Email Marketing Tool
You might wonder about how an email marketing tool can be helpful when it comes to customer support. But, some of your customers actually favor using email communication than other options. If you get a lot of direct inquiries or support requests via email, it’s never a bad idea to use an email marketing tool.
This tool may help you automate the responses to every email you get. You may also schedule such responses to save more time, as well as come up with conditions that would trigger auto emails immediately. For example, you may inform your customers that you got their email and would get back to them at the soonest date possible.
Conclusion
Effective customer support can be your company’s main power. That’s why investing in the above tools can make a difference in providing the highest possible level of customer satisfaction and excellent customer service. You don’t need to get all customer support tools for your business. The key to obtaining the best results is to choose the tools that are suited to your business size, budget, and how they’d work with your existing tools.