Not only does having the right tools with you afford you the chance to reach more customers, it also significantly reduces the frustration and friction of your customer service rep’s day-to-day job. This way, the time and energy spent on doing things manually can be dedicated to other ventures including expanding your business and improving your service delivery. That said, there isn’t a shortage of service tools either. If anything, they have been a proliferation of such tools especially in the advent of the Software-as-a-Service age. Which, of course, implies a couple of things – the main one being that it can be quite a challenge deciding the tools that you really need, and those that you can do without. Well, here’s a quick primer to the five most integral customer service tools every startup needs to have.
1. Help Desk/Ticket Software Tools
Despite the tremendous steps that we have taken in developing conversational technology, sending emails is still regarded as one of the most utilized support channels today. Unlike other contact methods, using emails doesn’t compel your customers to wait in a physical queue as they await a response from your rep. They will simply shoot them a question and keep checking their mail for a reply a few minutes, hours or days later. And apart from being one of the cheapest forms of customer service, it also considerably reduces employee idle time, especially in a busy enterprise. The biggest downside, however, is that it hardly allows instant support. Something that would make a huge difference particularly in an online business set up. That said, incorporating a ticket or helpdesk software like HelpRace to your service set up can turn this around as far as handling massive email requests and questions goes.
2. A Call Center/Telephone Software
A majority of your customers will prefer an immediate answer to their concerns as compared to waiting for a reply to their email inquiry. Making a phone call is one of most personal of customer service channels and, naturally, we all instinctively reach for our phones whenever we need an instant reply/answer to something. Companies with a well-structured and excellent voice customer service department are often able to keep their clients longer than those with a barely-functional one. That being said, maintaining an above-average call service center can be quite expensive and demanding. And the best way of mitigating this is by queueing and employing peak demand routing with the aid of a call center service tool such as G2Crowd.
3. Survey Tools
Measuring and constantly analyzing your company’s service/product quality is arguably one of the best ways of achieving continuous development in your firm. It’s only by comparing to previous results that you can improve or tweak your company’s performance for the better. Fortunately, though, you no longer have to administer survey questions manually via annoying email queries. Adopting one of the many survey service tools – such as Capterra– can save you a bulk of the valuable time that would otherwise be spent on filtering useful emails from spam replies.
4. Live Chat Software
The idea behind live chat software service tools is forged from blending the marketing potential of making live calls and the flexibility of using emails. Implementing a live chat, therefore, helps avoid the conventional tradeoff between quality and efficiency. Your agent can multitask and handle several customers at-a-go, while at the same time allowing an instant type of contact. Not only does this significantly improve your service delivery score, but also enables your agents to handle a bigger volume of requests and inquiries within a short timeframe. What’s more, there are some live chat software tools that allow agents to open live chats with up to 10 to 12 clients simultaneously.
5. Social Media Service Tools
We can’t deny the impact of social media platforms in our lives today – in a day and age where almost everyone owns a smartphone. Having a profile on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is one of the most practical ways of expanding your customer reach to a greater audience in a cheap, effortless way. Given the number of hours people spend online, most of your potential customers will prefer to relay their inquiries/complaints via your ‘inbox’ rather than call your reps or visit your official website. This, thus, makes social service an integral part of any modern business. And with a good tool such as AlternativeTo, you can manage several of your company’s social media pages across multiple platforms almost fluidly. Featured photo credit: Flickr via c2.staticflickr.com
