5 best customer service apps for the business
If you run a growing company, you need professional customer service software to level up the communication with your clients. Managing your customer service process is essential for the company to have more engaged and happy clients. Choosing the most suitable customer service tool allows you to navigate client interactions across different channels in the best way.
With the right customer service solution, you can effectively manage communication with your community on your website, social media, or mobile app. Adding a specialized customer support app to your suite of business tools will elevate your customer service abilities and internal communication.
Nowadays, you can choose from various customer service programs. From powerful chatbots to automated help desks, customer service software has transformed the way companies engage with their clients. Please read our article to discover which five best customer service apps businesses should use. We have outlined them to help you save time when researching the tools for scaling your business.
Types of customer service tools
Customer services solutions is a term with a relatively broad meaning. It could mean either internal communication support between employees, teams, and management or external support directed outside the company, including customers, partners, and service providers.
Service desk/Help desk
The help desk or service desk applications are often used by companies that provide IT services. Their features include ticket managing systems, shared inboxes, ensuring SLA compliance, etc. This customer service app helps companies keep IT departments and clients aligned for solving many technical issues.
Messaging
Many popular messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, Apple Business Chat, instant text messaging services, and others exist. This customer service solution provides asynchronous communication with customers, as many prefer it over live chat or phone support.
Live chat
Live chat is a modern customer service tool for real-time communication with customers in written form. It is less intrusive than the phone call but quickly solves many client issues. With live chat software, you have a more proactive approach to your customers as it usually involves behavior triggering, which shows you what clients do on your website, landing page, or mobile app. That way, your customer care team can deliver your clients the right message and offer them better service.
Nowadays, live chat solutions offer 24/7 customer support because of the implementation of AI with the help of chatbots.
They can give some automated answers to simple basic questions that customers write.
Probably one of the most popular tools for customer service is email. Like messaging, email is also an asynchronous form of communication. Yet, it is often used for solving more complicated problems of customers. The best advantage is that email can be used by people from all generations, from Baby Boomers to Gen Z.
Phone support
You can choose from multiple customer service apps on the market, but if you need urgent answers, you can always pick up the phone and contact the company’s phone support for help. Sometimes you cannot opt for email or even live chat communication. In other cases, solving your issue over the phone is much faster.
Implementing an advanced business phone system helps you provide first-class phone support. If it is a feature-rich calling solution that can be integrated with your customer service app, you can speed up your business communication.
Customer Relationship Manager (CRM)
When your business starts growing, it will be useful to have CRM software as part of your customer service solution. Thanks to it, you can collect data on the issues your clients experience with your products and services, which will help you improve them in the future. You can customize CRM systems to match your business and communications needs. This software solution helps you make data-driven decisions based on the track you keep for the interactions between your support team and your customers.
Knowledge base
Keeping a well-organized and detailed knowledge base can optimize the time spent on interactions between your customer care team and your clients. Customers often search for legal documents, SLAs (service level agreements), and FAQs before contacting you via phone, mail, or chat. So if you have a good knowledge base, you can optimize your support team’s time, allowing them to focus on specific problems that will improve the overall experience of your clients.
Best 5 customer service apps
Zendesk
Zendesk is a customer relationship management solution that helps you improve communication and collaboration with clients and colleagues. Initially, it was designed as a simple support ticket tool for the customer service departments. Gradually new functionalities were added to the Zendesk software bundle, which evolved into a complete Zendesk Support Suite.
Today, the Zendesk Support Suite includes seven products exclusively for customer support. Among them, you will find simple, easy-to-use single customer service apps and a feature-rich CRM platform. Depending on your business needs, you may find useful any of them: Zendesk Chat/Support, Zendesk Sell, Talk, and Sunshine Conversations.
The big advantage of Zendesk is its easy and seamless integration with different platforms and departments within your company. Combining it with other Zendesk tools lets you concentrate on improving the overall customer experience and not just servicing separate tickets to solve clients’ problems.
Key features
• Zendesk support is sufficient for ticket support services if you run a start-up or a small company.
• Your agents can work with email, chat, social, and voice from anywhere.
• To access all customer data from one spot – Zendesk Sell, Talk, and Sunshine Conversations improve customer interactions as the customer care team can track problems easier and offer faster solutions.
• With the help of the Answer bot, you can offer content relevant to your visitors.
• It helps your business to be flexible, thanks to the customized integrations and automated workflows.
• You can offer your clients integrated help centers and community forums to ensure they will get the answers to their questions.
• The Side Conversations tool allows you to communicate within and outside the company seamlessly and effectively.
• Track and analyze the team performance with detailed but easy-to-comprehend reports.
• Allocate the tickets directly to the right customer service representative to optimize the communication process.
What is its key advantage – The integration options of this help desk app include 100+ powerful business tools. It is the perfect customer service system for growing teams and companies who search for scalable solutions.
Suppose your company uses an advanced cloud phone system compatible with Zendesk. In that case, you can streamline customer service by allowing agents to call customers or co-workers from the Zendesk platform. With the help of a special app, the agent can click to call a customer from the ticketing system or the customer’s account in Zendesk.
Depending on your business phone system configuration, the agents can receive calls on their desk phone, mobile phone, or the app itself.
That speeds up communication within and outside the company enabling your support team to deliver great customer service. For more information about Zendesk and cloud-PBX interoperability, contact us!
Things to be improved in Zendesk- Some users complain about the organization of the ticket system and the difficulties they have when they want to track down the progress of a certain ticket. Another weak point is considered the enterprising pricing models. Small companies should pay for extra features they do not need to access basic features they need.
Pricing – Free trial, Price range from $49–$199/agent/month.
LiveChat
LiveChat is a customer service platform that connects clients and sales teams. It supports real-time communication between customer-facing support agents or sales reps and customers, giving them all the right tools to deliver omnichannel experiences. You can handle several communication channels, such as chat, email, and SMS, through a single dashboard.
LiveChat allows you to be proactive by delivering effortless messages to your target audience, sharing the company’s announcements, and inviting your website visitors to a real-time conversation via your chat app. It also enables internal communication between teams and departments within your company.
LiveChat is a customer service app that is very useful for generating and tracking leads.
Мarketers and sales managers can use its data to find a direct link between increasing sales and effective chat communication.
Key Features
• You can add tags to your messages based on the profile and behavior of your customers and send them more relevant information.
• Thanks to enhanced technologies, you can sneak-peak what your clients are typing even before they post their questions in the chat window. So you can prepare your answer and speed up the communication.
• Keep chat history with saved answers that can be applied in any conversation.
• You can customize your chat widget with “eye-catcher” techniques.
• Automatically transfer new chats to your available customer service agents.
Its key advantage is that agents can see what clients are typing before sending their questions, so they are ready with an immediate answer.
Things to be improved – the customer service app should offer a better user experience on mobile devices and more options for customization.
Pricing – Free trial. Plan pricing ranges from $16–$50+/agent/month.
FreshDesk
Freshdesk is a customer help desk app that stands out with its intuitive Team inbox. From there, agents can monitor and navigate all the incoming support tickets. It is an advanced ticket system integrating multiple communication channels between customers and agents like email, chat, phone, social media, and internal tools.
With Freshdesk, you have a single platform that helps boost customer interactions, automate workflow, and improve collaboration to solve problems faster.
Thanks to its enhanced features, like auto-assignment, you can allocate tickets automatically to available agents based on their expertise.
Key features
• With Agent Collision Detection, you can equally distribute tasks and tickets among your customer service reps.
• Optimize the structure of your ticketing system by splitting complex tickets into several child tickets.
• Save pre-formatted replies to frequently asked questions and link them to specific tickets so your agents can offer fast answers and solutions.
• You can transform useful tickets support replies into valuable content as part of your knowledge base with Email to Kbase.
• In your smart user interface, you can easily drag and drop assignments, track time for resolving issues, assign tasks, and add billable hours. You have your whole team’s workload available at a glance.
What is its key advantage – FreshDesk customer service app provides insightful and customizable reports that allow supervisors to understand better the work intensity in customer service teams. Thus they can make data-driven decisions for the improvement of the team’s performance.
Things to be improved – More processes and functionalities within the app should be automated. A phone integration option is missing, and implementing and maintaining the phone system is too expensive.
Pricing – Free trial. Free plan. Plan pricing ranges from $15–$99/agent/month.
Help Scout
Help Scout is an all-in-one customer service platform that includes an advanced shared inbox to supervise, access, and manage all your support issues from a single spot. It has a simple design and user-friendly interface.
Thanks to its advanced teamwork functionalities, you can streamline customer reps’ productivity to serve more clients at the time.
It is a feature-rich customer service software that offers many options for support and communication with your teams and customers, including auto-response, advanced formatting, in-app messaging, desktop notifications, email templates, and multi-channel support.
Key features:
•There is a helpful and detailed knowledge base created for customer self-service. It allows you to optimize customer support (by 20% stats) significantly.
• Offer live chat support for real-time conversations.
• Deliver the right message based on behavior triggers that allow you to engage better leads and onboard new customers.
• Provide customized support based on the history of resolved issues. You can track the whole process, from support requests and customer data to follow-up conversations and agent activity.
• With internal notes, you can communicate and collaborate effectively within your team. Sending up to 10 MB files to the ongoing emails allows you to deliver useful content like video or large graphic files.
What is its key advantage – Help Scout is an affordable customer-service application that enables your agents to work without burning out. With 75+ keyboard shortcuts, you can tick off your daily tasks.
Things to be improved – This customer service solution Needs more in-depth metrics and stats. To offer a complete service, they should provide tracking of chats and calls.
Pricing – Free trial. Plan pricing ranges from $20–$35+/user/month.
Intercom
With Intercom customer service software, you can hassle-free deploy real-time chat and advanced chatbots on your website. It is an all-encompassing customer support tool that streamlines client interactions. The Intercom Team Inbox is a useful feature that ensures flexibility for your customer care agents to follow requests and start a conversation on any platform, be it Facebook, Twitter, Live chat, email, or more.
Moreover, Intercom allows you to offer proactive support to your customers, regardless of their location.
Depending on the specifics of your niche and audience, you can use targeted messages with useful content or important announcements about product releases or updates. That customer service app enables you to scale your conversational experiences to meet your client’s expectations for professional support.
Key features
• Offer interactive experiences to your new customers with the help of detailed guides.
• Align customer communications from different platforms and keep your support style/proactive approach consistent throughout all channels.
• Apply work automation with the help of chatbots.
• A feature called Resolution Bot helps you speed up resolving simple issues of the clients.
• For the customers who connect via the mobile app, you can create personalized carousel screens to onboard and engage them better.
• Create product tours based on the automatic replies to FAQs and navigate your customers on solving their problems.
What is its key advantage – Intercom is a customer service app that allows you to customize the support process with the help of chatbots. Also, you can use bots to connect your audience with the right support experts.
Things to be improved – the tagging system of the tickets should be better organized and more customizable. If you are a small company, this customer service app can be pricey when you start upgrading.
Pricing – Free trial. Plan pricing ranges from $39–$999/month.
Benefits of customer service software
There are many customer service apps on the market, and choosing the best one can be challenging. After you analyze your specific support and communication needs, you can outline what type of customer service solution you need. Whether a standalone tool or an integrated CRM system, its benefits will outrun the investment required.
Improved customer satisfaction – customer service apps help you offer fast and personalized customer support for the enhanced experience of your clients. They are more satisfied with the personal approach, which encourages them to become loyal customers and brand ambassadors.
Improved teamwork – customer service tools optimize your internal collaboration and communication. Thanks to their enhanced features, your teammates can focus more on solving the clients’ issues and improving cooperation within the team. Customer service solutions improve automated workflow and keep track of each request’s history. Thus any available agent can access it and provide professional help to the community members.
Improved decision making
Thanks to your customer care tools, you can collect diverse and valuable data for your current and potential clients, including specific requests, bug reports, requests for new features and updates, and others. Based on it, you can excel in your products and services, support handling, and marketing goals.
Choosing the best customer service solution is a complex process that any company should consider. It can be a game-changer for delivering outstanding customer care and nurturing the relationship between your brand and clients. So once you have outlined your business goals and set up a budget, you can find the best customer service app for your company.
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