Continuing our pursuit to improve service quality we have to talk about customer support tools that work behind the scenes.

3 Customer Support Tools You Must Use

ZenDesk

This tool can be used by any company no matter its size to interact with their customers. For people who have never heard about this app before, ZenDesk is an online application that can help companies collate all customer query, requests, and complaints puts it in one interface. The beauty of the tool however lies in the fact that it can collect customer feedback from different channels be it Twitter, chat, email, or Facebook.

For example, if a customer leaves a complimentary message in Facebook and another customer tweets about a disappointing service experience, a customer service agent will receive ticket for both those messages on ZenDesk Interface. He or she can then easily reply back using the very same interface without even having to log on to Facebook or Twitter. However, this is just a broad view of what the software essentially does as it carefully hides a lot of neat features which makes it one of the best customer support tools in the market. Let’s check out some of these features.

Screen Sharing

One of those neat features is the integrated Screencasting feature which enables customers to share their computer screen with the customer service executive. This is a great add-on for IT companies who can use this feature to access the customer’s computer and resolve a particular problem instead of explaining the troubleshooting process to the customer.

Call Center Support

Taking a step further, ZenDesk have recently added the voice feature. This basically allows companies to setup call center support without buying any expensive hardware. When connected to a landline, customer support executives can receive and make service related calls. To sum it up this feature allows a company to setup a low cost inbound call center, outbound call center, or both.

Automate Responses

Customer service executives often have to answer the same question over and over again. To reduce resolution time, ZenDesk conveniently stores answers to all commonly asked questions. Next time the same query comes in executives can simply send the stored response.

UserVoice

UserVoice made it into our list because it carefully combines versatility and simplicity. The interface is so simple that the folks at UserVoice claim customer service executives require little to zero training to operate the system. There are three basic aspects of UserVoice starting with a multiplatform ticketing system. This automatically tracks all the customer requests and allows the executive to respond to them swiftly and easily.

Apart from the ticketing system the software also houses a feedback forum, which collates and presents all the feedback left by customers. This enables companies to understand specific customer wants allowing them to modify their products accordingly. Lastly it also integrates a knowledge base which basically is a tool for executives to answer frequently asked questions just by clicking on a few buttons. Let’s dig a bit deeper and find more about the features that makes UserVoice one of the best customer support tools in the market today.

Dashboard

The UserVoice dashboard is an area where all the vital information is presented in a organized and clean manner. This info includes number of open tickets, active ideas collated from customer feedback, instant answers to FAQs, overall satisfaction score collected from customers, and total number of users. The dashboard also displays the total number of customer interaction. All these data can give managers a bird’s eye view of the customer support system and make changes accordingly.

Inspector

This is a great feature that reveals past interactions the company had with a particular customer. It pulls data from CRM, billing, and other sources and nicely lists them down whenever a ticket is generated. For example, if a customer submits a complaint about a damaged product, the inspector lists the billing detail and previous interactions to give the executive a detailed overview of the ticket.

Company Insight

This is a neat new feature which automatically checks out a customer’s email address and checks if its company domain. If the domain does belong to a major corporation it collects data from Alexa and Forbes and displays them under Company Insight section. This info can help executive prioritize a ticket and possibly escalate it if there is a need.

Kayako

Last on our list of 3 best customer support tools is Kayako which makes it simply because it packs in a whole barrage of useful features. This customer service tool is catching the world by storm as its customers include Toshiba, Pearson, Intel, FedEx, Kraft Food, General Electrics, Peugeot, and NASA. In fact a whopping 20percent of the Fortune 100 companies chose Kayako over other customer support tools in the market. Kayako allows companies to interact with their customers over phone, email, social media, remote desktop, live chat, and self help sections. Let’s take detailed look at some of its key features.

Ticketing

Kayako helps prioritize each customer emails and makes it accessible to the right people or the right department. These emails are collected from both the company website and the mail.

Voice

Kayako enables you to capture call data storing info like current status of the ticket, duration of the call, name of the agent who handled the call, and more.

Self Service

Knowledge bases help customers to find the information they are looking for in an organized and simple manner. Kayoko allows companies to design and layout their own knowledge bases which customer can navigate through to find what they are looking for.

Live Chat

Whenever there is a need executives can choose to directly chat with customers to get a better understanding of the issue at hand. The Kayako chat interface also cleverly includes file sharing and screenshot sharing features. The live chat also comes with real time traffic monitoring which allows users to proactively engage customers who are on their website. This data also signal key sales opportunities and helps companies understand the reaction of their marketing strategies. The inclusion of this monitoring system makes Kayako one of the top customer support tools in the market today.