Customer service in 2024 is more competitive than ever. If you don’t offer a 24-hour customer service, your competitors might. If you don’t let your customers self-service, your competitors might.
This intense competition has created a highly charged environment where a range of software tools race to provide the best solution at the most reasonable price.
With new, innovative companies shaking up the field every other day, identifying the best software solution for your business can be challenging.
The Customer Service Software Features Arms Race
Some software covers all your customer relations needs, from email marketing to social media campaigns. This includes software like Hubspot, Tidio, and Kustomer. While these comprehensive solutions may be attractive to larger, more established companies, growing companies often prioritize agility and ease.
Specialized software like knowledge base tools are ideal for startups and growing companies. Major players in this space include Helpjuice, Bloomfire, and Nuclino.
Upgrade Your Customer Service with Superior Software
Knowledge bases make a great primer for other, more advanced solutions like messaging tools, shared inboxes, and social media management software.
If you’d like to revolutionize your customer service with the immediate response your customers demand keep reading on! We’ll explore how the 8 main types of customer service software operate independently or as part of a broader strategy.
9 Types of Customer Service Software
While customer service software can be found in a variety of forms for multiple functions, in this article, we’re going to explore the 8 most common types:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
- Messaging and Chat Tools
- Shared Inbox Software
- Help Desk Software
- Knowledge Base Software
- Social Media Management Tools
- Feedback and Survey Tools
- Live Video Chat Solutions
- Tutorial software
Knowledge Base Software
A knowledge base is an IT system that allows your team to capture and distribute crucial data at their discretion. Knowledge bases usually come in the form of a web portal that gives users access to a range of documents, video tutorials, and other resources that help your customers self-service.
How Does Knowledge Base Software Improve Customer Service?
One of the best ways to improve your customer service is by utilizing knowledge base software. Knowledge base software is a versatile tool that fulfills either client-facing or internal functions, making it a popular software solution in business at all scales and across industries.
Knowledge base software shows its main advantage over other types of customer service software with its flexibility. You can choose to deploy knowledge base software at any point of your customer’s lifecycle. It can support your sales efforts by giving your customers a point of reference.
A major hurdle to signing up for a new service or purchasing a new product is fear. Your customers want to know that they’re dealing with a trustworthy partner who will deliver on their expectations.
In the information age, customers want to be as informed as possible when making any purchasing decision. Even seemingly trivial decisions like a new pair of earphones will be subjected to comparison, research, and more comparison.
And once you’ve finally got your customers hooked, retaining them can be an even bigger problem. Knowledge base software helps improve conversions and decrease customer churn by giving your customers the information they need whenever they need it.
Internal Vs External Knowledge Base Software
Knowledge bases can also be a valuable internal resource for your customer support team. Whether you’re introducing a new feature, offering a new product, or even launching a new brand, keeping your customer support up to date on the ins and outs of your product is essential.
How External Knowledge Bases Help Customers
Confused customers are rarely happy customers, and if your customer service team is unaware about a new feature or update, that could quickly turn a positive growth opportunity into a PR nightmare.
Knowledge base software helps you get ahead of this problem. When deployed internally, knowledge bases can seamlessly connect teams from different departments.
How Knowledge Bases Help Employees to Help Customers
Your product development team can easily keep your customer service and sales teams in the loop without holding exhaustive meetings. You can assign tutorials or assessment programs that ensure both teams are on the same page.
Knowledge bases are often designed to seamlessly integrate into your workflow. Helpjuice achieves this with its class-leading suite of integrations that send you notifications via email, allow you to connect with Slack, and do so much more.
Messaging and Chat Tools
Sometimes customers may need more help than they can get through self-servicing. But phone calls are so 2000s. As instant messaging tools have gained popularity over the past decade, consumer behavior has adapted. Most consumers are now more comfortable with texting customer service over a portal than they are with making or receiving phone calls.
This is especially true with issues that are of higher value yet not complex.
For simple, everyday fixes, knowledge-based software will cover most of your bases. However, if your customers are facing a billing issue or a problem that significantly undermines functionality, talking to someone will let you solve their problem and ease any lingering dissatisfaction.
Limitations to Chat Tools
While messaging tools can be a valuable part of your customer relationship management, they lack the flexibility of knowledge-based software. Customers will likely only interact with your chat and messaging tools when they’re trying to solve a problem, and once that problem is solved, they’re unlikely to learn more about your service.
Knowledge base tools can be used as a proactive method to educate your customers about your services during onboarding, opening up cross-selling opportunities. While messaging and chat tools lack this ability, they can still be a useful tool to use as part of your broader strategy.
Some widely used chat and messaging tools include Rocket.Chat, Livechat, and Smartsupp.
Shared Inbox Tools
Collaboration can be hard, and a long trail of forwarded emails doesn’t help that. Shared inboxes are email inboxes that can be accessed by multiple members of your team, making it quicker and easier to put your heads together to solve high-ticket issues.
Shared inboxes are a common solution in customer service, with department/customer/project (DCP) inboxes being the simplest way to organize them. With DCP inboxes, you can route all emails coming to a specific department, from specific customer segments, or based on different projects your business may be working on.
Challenges and Limitations to Shared Inbox Tools
While DCP and other shared inboxes can be a useful tool for streamlining your internal and external communications, they carry the risk of confusion and duplicate replies. Even the most well-intentioned team may end up in a confusing situation if proper protocols and procedures are not in place.
Social Media Management Tools
In the modern world, social media isn’t just an effective marketing channel. Social media is where your customers likely spend the majority of their time and, if something goes wrong, it may be the first place many of them turn to to voice their frustrations.
Your social media manager may be great at understanding your audience and creating compelling strategies, but they may be ill-equipped to respond to customer complaints or queries. Social media customer service tools can take some of the heat off your social media teams with automated tickets, shared inboxes, and a range of other useful tools.
Limitations of Social Media Management Tools
While social media is a powerful platform, it can also be quite chaotic. Users may not use their real names on social media, making it difficult to determine if they’re really customers or just angry trolls. Keeping track of what people are saying about you on social media can also be an exhaustive task, as there could easily be thousands of mentions of your brand within days.
To keep your social media manager sane, social media tools are best used proactively to build and maintain a community. It can serve as a great point of first contact when issues do arise, but you’ll still need more dedicated tools to
Live Video Tools
While most of the solutions we’ve mentioned so far have been primarily text-based, live video tools introduce a new dimension to your customer relationship management. Chat tools, knowledge bases, and other text-based tools give your customers quick solutions when they’re in a bind, but complex problems will require more involved solutions.
Why Customers Love Live Video Tools
Live video tools let your customers get direct answers. However, the logistics of live video tools may pose a challenge. While a single customer service employee may be able to respond to two or three chat or message tickets at a time, they’ll only be able to give their full attention to one video.
Limitations of Live Video Tools
It may also be more expensive to use live video tools than chat tools or knowledge base software. Knowledge base software is infinitely scalable at a remarkably low price, allowing you to grow your customer base without inflating your budget. Strategically, live tools are the most appropriate for high-ticket issues, important customers, and other high-priority situations.
Survey Tools
Feedback gives you valuable information that could unlock game-changing opportunities for your business. This often ignored aspect of customer service could clue you into what your customers appreciate most about your business and help you discover if there are any poor-performing functions, features, or products you could innovate on.
Surveys are relatively simple and inexpensive to use and deploy. You could create a webpage with a click counter to functionally serve as your survey tool, then distribute it across social media and with email campaigns. Of course, there’s also a range of companies that give you more convenient options than this bootstrapped approach.
Limitations to Survey Tools
Even so, it may be hard to justify the price of a survey-exclusive tool. These tools provide useful information to improve your offers, but they lack flexibility and are best used alongside other tools, such as knowledge bases or live video tools.
Help desk Software
Help desk software is an indispensable tool for your customer service team. With help desk software, your team can collect tickets from multiple channels and organize them according to priority, urgency, territory, or any of dozens of different filters. Helpdesk software is foundational to customer service.
Some customers may try to contact you via social media or email, while others will diligently search for your support page to open a direct ticket. Helpdesk software can be connected to any of these channels, from phone calls to web forms, and it organizes tickets automatically to make the most out of your staff.
While your customers may not even know that they’ve interacted with your helpdesk software, your customer support staff will thank you for it!
Limitations of Helpdesk Software
Helpdesk software is incredibly useful, but its role in your business may be limited by price and complexity. Additionally, helpdesk software mostly facilitates processes and may lack the ability to provide meaningful information. For this reason, helpdesk software often works best when paired with a helpdesk knowledge base.
Customer Relationship Management Software
Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a nebulous term that covers a range of software solutions. While most CRM software places an emphasis on sales and marketing, CRM software can be used as part of your customer service strategy.
Some common features found in CRM software include contact and account management, interaction tracking, and document management. CRM software can play a vital role in your customer service processes, especially if it is used in concert with other tools like knowledge management software.
With CRM software, you can send helpful emails and identify which customers have opened them. You can also keep track of how often your customers visit your sites, click on your links, and fill out your forms. This data gives you access to valuable analytical opportunities, potentially unlocking new revenue streams.
Limitations of Customer Service Software
In isolation, however, CRM software can restrict your customer service processes. While CRM software tracks accounts, it doesn’t give your customers any direct support. You can easily overcome this shortcoming by integrating your CRM software with a knowledge base.
Tutorial Software
.Free tutorial software like Wizardshot makes it easy and convenient for businesses to create tutorials internally and externally. Tutorial software uses AI to quickly turn your screen recording to an easy-to-follow instruction for your customers or teams.
Choose The Best Customer Service Software for Your Business
Customer service software has expanded dramatically in the last few years, unlocking new ways for businesses to support their customers or empower customers to self-service. If you still feel lost with the best solution for your company, knowledge base software is a great place to start!
Knowledge base software lets you upgrade your customer service almost instantly, and it serves as the perfect foundation to build more advanced customer support strategies. Start building your knowledge base for free with Helpjuice and discover what your team has been missing out on!
