Customer Support // 7 Must-Have Tools to Enable Your Team

Customer Support  // 7 Must-Have Tools to Enable Your Team

The importance of customer service cannot be overlooked. According to a report by  Microsoft, 90% of customers say that customer service is the key determining factor when it comes to their choice and loyalty to a brand. 

Over the years the relationship between businesses and consumers has changed considerably. Back in the day, low price and high quality were of utmost importance to customers. 

Today, pricing and quality continue to matter. However, a new factor in deciding between competing brands is customer service; brands are battling it out to meet customers at the intersection of convenience and speed.

It’s time for brands to flip the switch and be loyal to customers by paying attention to their needs and offering solutions to meet those needs.

In this article we share with you some  tools that  will enable you to improve  on your customer service, driving the kind of personal interaction at scale while also helping delivery of services effectively.

Internal communications software

If you are working with teams, internal communications platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams are a must.

Real-time chat amongst colleagues creates conversations that can lead to new processes and better answers (and make sure to update your knowledge base when you get them!). 

In cases of coworking spaces and business hubs like Nairobi Garage, internal communication channels allow us the liberty to easily communicate with our clients and instead of spamming them with emails the channels enable us to easily communicate and also offer a unique platform for members to even interact with each other online.

Email can also work, but it’s best to choose one as your primary internal communications channel to reduce confusion about where conversations should happen

Customer relationship management software

CRMs are built to help teams across the board manage customer interactions with ease.

For customer support teams, CRM software help in storing customer details, recording customer queries, and tracking the progress of customer support issues. 

What’s more, a CRM provides a centralized database that lets multiple team members access important customer information – from past orders, to chat history and ongoing requests. 

It makes data about any customer interaction available to any team member who may need it. 

You can use any effective CRM tool like Zoho Desk, Salesforce Service Cloud, etc. to tailor the overall service experience. This will help you increase customer satisfaction and ultimately retention.

According to studies investing in a CRM can help increase customer retention by 27%! HubSpot and Salesforce are great examples of popular CRMs that many big brands rely on.

Reporting dashboard

The most ideal way to analyze the success of your customer support is through interactive dashboards that showcase critical customer service metrics — providing you powerful insights to help you make data-driven decisions. It’s easy to get bogged down with data.

The key lies in knowing what to track and use to be able to boost your customer service.

Robust and in-depth analytics are known to help customer support teams take their efficiency and productivity up several notches. 

For crunching data and pulling up neat and customizable customer service performance reports, Qualtirics and Databox are excellent software solutions to consider.

Social listening and monitoring tool

Are you keeping an eye on the online conversations about your brand? How do customers perceive your products and services on social media?

Social listening and monitoring tools can help you a great deal in keeping a pulse on brand sentiments and more importantly what your customers want. 

Using these tools, you can closely track what customers are saying about your brand and your competitors. You can then delight them with special offerings curated to meet their needs. 

Also Read: Customer Service Week // 5 Great Lessons Learned Overtime

Monitoring brand mentions will help you identify customer complaints and respond to them quickly before they mount up into a thread of negative feedback about your brand.

Hootsuite and Sprout Social are our personal favorites when it comes to social listening and monitoring tools.

Customer feedback survey

Surveys have been in use from time immemorial and they are one of the most useful tools to gather customer feedback.

Knowing your customers is important to your success. Sending out a customer feedback survey to understand people’s thoughts about your products can give you some useful insights into your both, your product, as well as your support quality and performance. 

People tend to be more honest in these surveys than if they were to be asked questions in person. 

There are a host of customer surveys that will help you tie down what customers want from your business. 

Typically, every customer feedback survey comes with a set of questions that are related to a specific metric. 

These customer experience metrics include the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES).

Two commonly used tools to send out these follow up feedback surveys are SurveyMonkey and Typeform.

Live chat Tool

Live chat software is another essential customer support tool your team needs. 

After all, providing live chat can have a huge impact on customer retention and experience. 

Offering live chat features can help you communicate with your customers in real-time – whether they visit your website or your mobile app. 

It can help you provide immediate and proactive support to your customers.

Having said that, a poorly designed live chat experience is worse than not having live chat support. 

So if you are all pumped about adding this feature to your website, make sure you choose the right one for your brand. 

Pure Chat, ProProfsChat, and LiveChat are some popular live chat software you can check out.

Knowledge base

We live in the era of Google and people always look for answers on the internet. In fact, that’s the first thing that most people do before they take their problem elsewhere. 

According to an article by Harvard Business Review, 81% of customers across industries attempt to resolve issues on their own before contacting a live representative.

By investing in a knowledge base software tool you can create, store, manage and share self-service content in the form of FAQs pages, how-to-videos, blogs, and tutorials. 

While your customers can use your knowledge base to self-serve, your customer care team can also refer to it for answers to common support queries, and resolve customer requests much faster.

A knowledge base can also reduce the burden of mounting customer requests on your support team.

Lyft is a great example of a brand with a super-clean and easy-to-navigate knowledge base. 

If you’re looking to invest in a knowledge base, ProProfs and Helpjuice are great choices to consider.