A lack of adequate tools can, without a doubt, limit your productiveness and service setup, regardless of the enterprise that you’re running. If you are a startup, in particular, there is no way your growth can be possible if you do not consider customer service correctly.
Not only does having the right tools allow you to reach more customers, but 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 devices, especially in the advent of the Software-as-a-Service age. This, of course, implies a couple of things – the main one being that it can be quite a challenge deciding the tools you need and those you can do without.
Here’s a quick primer on the five most integral customer service tools every startup needs.
1. Help Desk/Ticket Software Tools
Despite our tremendous steps in developing conversational technology, sending emails is still regarded as one of the most utilized support channels today.
Unlike other contact methods, emails don’t compel your customers to wait in a physical queue as they await a response from your rep. They will 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 setup. That said, incorporating a ticket or helpdesk software like HelpRace into your service setup can turn this around regarding handling massive email requests and questions.
2. A Call Center/Telephone Software
Most of your customers will prefer an immediate answer to their concerns than waiting for a reply to their email inquiry. Making a phone call is one of the most personal customer service channels. Naturally, we 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 can often 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. By comparing to previous results, you can improve or tweak your company’s performance for the better.
Fortunately, you no longer have to administer survey questions via annoying email queries manually. 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, it also enables your agents to handle a more considerable volume of requests and inquiries within a short timeframe.
What’s more, some live chat software tools allow agents to simultaneously open live chats with up to 10 to 12 clients.
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 are 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 potential customers will prefer to relay their inquiries/complaints via your ‘inbox’ rather than call your reps or visit your official website. Thus, social service is an integral part of any modern business. And with a suitable tool such as AlternativeTo, you can manage several of your company’s social media pages across multiple platforms almost fluidly.
