Essential Customer Support Tools for a Great Customer Experience

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It’s no secret that great customer experience is important to customers. In fact, Gladly found that 77% of customers said they’d recommend a brand to friends and family after a personalized customer experience.

Sometimes, however, providing great experience is directly linked to your agents and their ability to do their jobs with ease. And with so many customer support tools out there, it’s hard to wade through them to see what works.

Let’s talk about different types of customer support tools and how to go about choosing them for your team.

What to look for in a customer support tool

• Scalability: Evaluating scalability in a tool is a simple way to cut out a large percentage of the solutions out there. Make sure you aren’t getting something that only fits your needs now and that will allow you to meet your long-term as well as current goals.
• Intuitive use: There are enough robust support tools out there that will both provide your agents with advanced features and still be easy to use. With everything expected of customer service agents, they shouldn’t have to struggle with their support tool platform, and they should be able to rely on a solution that is both robust and intuitive.
• Cost: It’s important to find the right balance between cost and capability. A lot of this will come down to the size of your organization and your scaling needs. The more scaling capabilities, customization, and data-storing needs, the higher the cost will be.

Types of customer support tools for your team

There are a lot of different types of customer support tools out there, and while some will only have a few of the below-mentioned features, many of them, like Gladly, will have a thorough set of features that will help turn your customer service agents into customer service heroes.

Customer service software

• Customer service software is sometimes referred to as a CRM, or customer relationship manager. CRMs are great ways to assign tickets to representatives and team members, but CRMs alone will lack the human touch to radically personalize the way you do customer service.

• Advanced customer service software will allow you to track tickets with ease, collaborate with other team members, and enable your customer project managers to maintain quality with your customer service representatives.

• More than 85% of customers told Gladly that they expect to move seamlessly between channels. The ability for your agents to alternate between phone calls, SMS, email, social media platforms, and applications is becoming an expectation rather than a perk.

• Whether you’re resolving technical-related issues, customer issues, customer billings, orders, or returns, you should expect advanced solutions to provide automated workflows.
• One of the ways to guarantee that your help desk software will be easy to use is to have a solution that allows you to customize your visual interface, categories, ticketing que, customer reports, and much more.

Live chat/telephone software

While the majority of customers across all industries still primarily use the phone in order to contact companies for support, the need for live chat us continuing to grow.

One of the things that will make it easy for both your agents and customers is the ability of your solution to save, track, and present conversation history between all channels. That way, your agents will know exactly what your customers need regardless of what communication channel they’re using.

Social media integration

Cutting-edge solutions, like Gladly, will allow you to meet your customers on Instagram and more, allowing them to reach out for customer support when they want, where they want.

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Chatbots

The power of AI chatbots are more complex, powerful, and human than their rule-based chatbot counterparts. AI chatbots are able to simulate person-to-person experience so your customers actually feel like they’re interacting with a real person. Whether you’re looking to scale, reduce wait time for customers, or provide night-time support, AI chatbots are a great way to help improve the customer experience.

Knowledge base software

Advanced customer support tools will have their knowledge bases integrated into their platform. This will make it easy for agents to recall company information, learn how to use the platform on their own, and find easy-to-read Q&A pages regarding their solution.

Video conferencing/recording

Video calling has grown in recent years, and the ability to screen share through video conferencing will provide your customers with another option to help get reliable and consistent assistance from representatives. The ability to record will also ensure that you can manage calls and assess training needs more accurately.

Internal team collaboration and communication tool

Your tool will best serve your agents if it allows for internal team collaboration and communications. Omnichannel solutions, personal customer profiles, and communication history logs will make it easy to switch agents between customer-related issues and tickets.

Additionally, updating your internal knowledge base will make sure your team members are up-to-date on any and all internal changes.

Gladly’s Radically Personal Customer Support Tool

With so many different types of customer support tools, it may be hard to know what your best options are. Knowing your scaling needs and overall strategy is a good place to start, but regardless of your size or goals, you want a solution that will help place your customers at the center of customer service experience.

Gladly guarantees a cutting-edge solution that will allow you to move seamlessly between channels, review unique customer profiles, automate workflows, and connect with your customers on a human level.

Start treating your customers like people, not tickets, and try Gladly today.