By: Amy @IWantItNowBlog Clark

We’ve said many times that customer service is one of those parts of your business that you just can’t afford to have go wrong. When you hear someone speak ill of a company, how often is it because their customer service was not up to snuff? At least nine out of ten times, right? Yeah, this the phenomenon we’ve talked about at length – it is your customer service for which you will ultimately be judged, not how good your product or service is. This is why you need to choose wisely your customer service tools. But, there’s a seriously bad signal to noise ratio when it comes to available customer service tools available that’re exceptional and ones that’re just … there. There’s so much of this out there (even predating the SaaS revolution) that it’s overwhelming trying to sift through all of even a specific subgenre of support tools let along the entire ensemble of tools you need to make a full bodied infrastructure that works on all levels. Oh man, what a mess! Nobody seems to agree on what’s good and what isn’t either, and I see so much of this bickering over minutia among my colleagues and on customer support blogs, SaaS blogs and everywhere. Is it that hard to come to a somewhat general academic conclusion about this particular niche? It seems so. Well, I’m not going to argue with anyone about it. I’m going to recommend to you three solutions that, placed together, make that full bodied infrastructure I was talking about. I am recommending these three from experience with them being solid, not due to the hype machine that gets a lot of the bad offerings put on pedestals. Ready? Here we go!

#1 – Live Person (Chat) You need a chat framework for two different reasons. The first is to communicate between supervisors and agents, as well as agents communicating across departments. This makes the call center experience much easier when the customer needn’t be put on hold for the agent to make an intramural inquiry. Second, chat systems for customers to text-communicate with agents is becoming very popular, and it removes some of the nuisance associated with the call center while still retaining that live peer to peer interaction that has preserved the call center as a thing. Live Person is probably the best system like this out there. With a rich private messaging system, queue placement management and indicators, logging and time stamps and an intuitive centralization to ensure that messages and conversations don’t get mixed up, this is a really strong chat system. If you’re used to SMS or an instant messenger, then picking up Live Person is almost completely devoid of a learning curve.

#2 – Parature (Help Desk) Now, if you’re smart, you’re going as multi-channel as you possibly can. Embracing the rejuvenation of the help desk methodology is a wise decision to make in that regard. These systems fell out of favor for a while, but with better web infrastructure to support them speeding up, they’re back with a vengeance. Parature is an example of the help desk done right. This thing is a beast. Along with being scalable and fully customizable, it boasts integration with social support methodologies via Facebook and other systems. Also fully ready for mobile support on customer and agent ends and one of the most intuitive issue tracking systems I’ve ever seen, you can’t go wrong with Parature as your help desk solution.

#3 – WalkMe (Self Service and Tutorialization) And who doesn’t love self service? Nobody, that’s who! If you’re going multi-channel with your support, go all the way and relegate the simpler push button inquiries and resolutions to the customer with no need for agent intervention. This will speed up the call center, the chat system and the help desk because they’re only worrying about issues that demand their intervention. WalkMe is the best tool ever built for this. Designed to be a point and click tutorial creation system to guide users through operating the most complex web processes, it can intelligently use notes, automation and a rich UI to help users do the most difficult things with CRM, account modification and even resolving technical issues. All of this, of course, can be done with no risk of the customer pushing the wrong button or getting confused and breaking something. WalkMe is really slick, and has pretty much single handedly made self-service support a thing that exists. These are the best customer service tools to help build a multi-faceted, effective customer service and support infrastructure that will take your company far. Forget the squabbling that most support people are still partaking in and just go for the best stuff. This stuff right here.

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