If you run any type of business, you know that keeping your clients not only satisfied but impressed is a major key to success. You WANT happy customers, and you definitely don’t want angry customers firing off scathing reviews to be shared across the internet. But delivering stellar customer service every time can quickly get away from any business owner, especially if you’re growing rapidly.
So how do you better ensure your customers are kept happy, supported and returning? The right customer service software may be your answer. Read Benzinga’s review of the best Customer Service Software to find out more.
Best for Growing Businesses: Groove
If you’re running a start-up, you need a few things from your customer service, and Groove provides. Groove is an all-in-one customer service software platform created by a small business owner who couldn’t find what they needed from available options.
Groove knows you need fast, easy set-up, integrated customer support, an intuitive self-service hub, analytics and insights, a ton of app integrations to keep up with always advancing technology, and, above all else, scalability. Groove brings you simplified but powerful customer support tools, like Shared Inbox and Knowledge Base, to ensure your customer service is fully scalable.
With Shared Inbox, your customers will enjoy the familiarity of email on their end, while your team benefits from seeing all interactions, across all channels and departments, in one place to better stay on top of support requests. Knowledge Base acts as your always-on customer self-service portal. On your end, enjoy fully customizable templates and intuitive reporting for insights on how well your Knowledge Base is performing. On the client end, they’ll love the mobile capability of your Knowledge Base and easily accessible widgets that you can embed on all of your pages.
Groove offers free demos and 15-day free trials to interested parties. Get in touch with them here to get started.
Pricing: $12, $20, $35 or custom pricing per month per user; reduced price plans available to start-ups with less than 10 employees
Mobile app? Mobile web app
Best for Ticket Management: Zoho Desk
To help your customer service agents deliver the best experience possible, you need an organized system to track and respond to customer requests in their appropriate order. Zoho Desk goes above and beyond to provide companies like yours with this exact solution, offering a sophisticated ticket management hub.
Within this hub, you’ll get multichannel communication, unique portals for all of your brands and multi-department help desk structuring to keep the whole team on track even when one section is inundated with help requests. Other useful Zoho features include live chat widgets, Zia, an intuitive AI able to provide contextual response and insights, embeddable self-service for the DIY customer, mobile ticket management and more.
If you want to check out what else Zoho Desk has to offer, you can try any of their subscription plans for free for 15 days. Sign up for your free account here.
Pricing: $0, $12, $20 or $35 per month per agent billed annually
Mobile app? Yes
Best Platform with a Free Option: Service Hub from HubSpot
“Free” often comes with a caveat, but not with Service Hub from Hub Spot. While you can opt for paid subscriptions from HubSpot, their free version provides solid customer service software.
The Service Hub free version has everything you need to get started: ticketing, live chat, email scheduling, conversations inbox, phone system integration and more. And if you find yourself in need of a higher tier of services, it's easy to scale up with upgrades and add-ons. HubSpot is known for its bundled offerings, allowing you to combine other services like CRM, marketing and sales tools with your service features.
Get started by making your free HubSpot account here.
Pricing: $0 or starting at $45, $360 or $1200 per month
Mobile app? Yes
Best for Service Companies: Salesforce Service Cloud
Customer satisfaction can be tricky if your company is in the business of providing field services or other services. It’s not as if your client can return their haircut or rip out their newly landscaped lawn and start over. If your client isn’t happy with the service, you have to find another way to make it right. Salesforce Service Cloud is a service-focused customer support platform powered by the Salesforce business applications suite that will help you do just that.
Features like virtual support capabilities for your field service agents empower them to do the job perfectly the first time or provide support to your clients remotely without bogging them down with a million in-person meet-ups. Their customizable, low-code platform means you can easily scale your help desk as you grow without breaking stride. A wide roster of Service Cloud productivity tools, like a 360-degree agent workspace and service process automation, allows your agents to deftly navigate each customer interaction with all of the necessary information in front of them. Your clients will love the convenience and increased responsivity Service Cloud brings to your customer service portal.
Want to see what Salesforce Service Cloud can do for your service-based business? Try it for free or watch a demo here.
Pricing: $25, $75, $150 or $300 per month per agent billed annually
Mobile app? No
Best for Customer Self-Service: Zendesk
Waiting on hold or for a live chat to connect is usually not an ideal way to introduce an already frustrated customer to your customer support. A minority of clients do want to be walked through their queries, but research shows that 81% of customers try to manage an issue before trying to contact a company for support. Zendesk is an all-in-one customer service help desk platform with heavy-hitting customer self-service capabilities, allowing you to give your customers what they’re really after -- a solution, so they can get on with their day.
Zendesk’s powerful self-service tools are supported by 4 main pillars: Guide, Answer Bot, Gather and Support. With Guide, provide a solid foundation of knowledge by creating a community and dedicated space where smart customers can contribute their experiences.
Answer Bot is an integrated AI feature that offers your customers relevant helpful information about their queries and maps trends in customer complaints.
Gather allows you to create a customer forum, giving your customers a voice. Your company will benefit from the community collaboration with and feedback from the people who keep it going -- your clients. And Zendesk Support is where self-service merges with the overall knowledge base, providing an at-a-glance synopsis of all your customer service interactions.
Zendesk offers demos and free trials for all of its products and features. Start your free trial here.
Pricing: From $5, $19, $49, $99 or $199 per month per agent billed annually
Mobile app? Yes
Important Features of Customer Service Software
Customer service takes many forms, and the features found in customer service software are just as widely varied. But you can generally rely on the following list of features as an indicator of how useful a customer service software platform will be for your company:
- A shared inbox so every team member has the information they need to handle each service request.
- Help desk software acts as an integrated hub to manage tickets, automate customer service interactions and manage multiple channels at once.
- Multi-platform customer service access for clients, including in-app messaging on platforms like Facebook, live chat capabilities, phone access and more.
- Customer self-service and knowledge center for DIY clients and to provide go-to answers to common issues for your agents.
- A high level of scalability keeps your customer service up to speed through each new growth milestone.
Benefits of Customer Service Software
- Highly responsive, consistent, intuitive support.
- Automate tasks to keep your agents focused on client satisfaction.
- Aggregate insights and reports to better inform your customer service and overall business strategy.
- Improved collaboration and efficiency among team members -- no more inter-team politics or embarrassing double-answers so you can present a united front to already-concerned clients.
- Easily scale your customer service as you grow.
Cost of Customer Service Software
Now that you’ve decided that customer service software will do your business good, how much should you look to spend? Several factors influence this choice, including the size of your business, your customer service needs, what vertical you’re operating in and the pace of your growth, but ultimately -- it's up to you and what’s best for your company. We found the following price ranges from our partners above:
Small Businesses: $0 to $75 per user per month
Mid-Size Businesses: $12 to $360 per user per month
Large Businesses: $35 to $1200 per user per month or custom pricing packages
Build a Loyal Client Base with Stellar Customer Support
A solid and ever-growing customer base is paramount to any business’ continued success, and consistent client satisfaction bolstered by a powerhouse customer support portal is vital to this. But it's not always easy to deliver on this front each and every. That’s why a good customer support software platform is becoming ever-more necessary for businesses of all types and sizes.
Use Benzinga’s list of the best customer service softwares to turn clients into happy clients, and turn happy clients into forever-clients. Get in touch with any of the platforms on our list to get started today.
Best Customer Service Software Methodology
Benzinga analyzed the top Customer Service Software by industry and winnowed down the list to include those with the best attributes. We prioritized pricing, features and scalability. We also considered the availability of a mobile app and consumer reviews.
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