I don’t want to do this one to be honest, because I’ve talked about every one of these a billion times at this point, and it’s too early into the year to actually have any news or innovations to speak of. But, in the effort of maintaining the visibility and presence of customer service apps and which ones do what, we have to, yet again, talk them further into the ground.
Nothing New Under the Sun:
There’s nothing new to say here versus near the end of last year, when we last did a customer service apps list like this, so those of you who read it, you don’t empirically need this one. But, I suggest at least doing a summary glance over this, in case you’ve forgotten about some of these, and have recently found it topical once more.
For new readers, here are the most popular ones. A couple of these are kind of redundant, but I can’t help that.
For Help Desks:
For help desks, you have a couple popular choices, and I’ve picked out two to look at.
#1 – Zendesk
Zendesk is the more well-known of these due to age and ergo due to scale of user community. It’s priced for various business sizes, so it’s penetrable to small businesses but scalable to larger business.
It’s been tested to be capable of integration with Netsuite, Force.com and other big CRM and BI suites as well. However, its methodologies are becoming a bit antiquated and archaic, and its integration with social networks and other newer frameworks is a bit stiff and awkward.
I’m sure that’ll change but for now, it is, as they say, what it is.
#2 – Parature
I have less to say about Parature because I’ve never used this one. But I have colleagues who do, and they basically point out what I’d gleaned from my own research, and that is that this one is really only for medium and large businesses.
It is, however, more compatible with contemporary systems, as it’s a younger design. But, I’ve found no conclusive evidence of it integrating nicely with things, and it’s expensive.
For Live Chat:
I don’t care for live chat, but there are times it’s necessary (it’s that or call centers, and of the two, the former is less horrid).
#3 – LivePerson
This is the only one of these I know much about, and it’s, again, due to colleagues who use it. I don’t have a lot to say about this one other than, it works, it plays nice with other solutions, and it’s flexible and call center-like in its exchanges and the like, making it easy to adopt and manage.
Additional:
#4 – Salesforce App Exchange
The Salesforce App Exchange offers a number of solutions to turn CRM directly into customer support, or at least as a supplement to other solutions like the ones on this list.
Not a Force.com user? Netsuite and Zoho’s app systems can do similar things, though dare I say less gracefully.
#5 – WalkMe
WalkMe is for self service, or to speed up use of the other solutions, both by the same methodology. It’s designed as a hands on, step by step guidance tutorial creator, with the unique mindset of guiding them through actual use, to learn.
It integrates into forms, and corrects mistakes, spots problems and prompts users as they go. You can either enable users to handle their own problems, or speed up everything else for agents via simple to use automata.
So, there are a lot of customer service apps, but these are the same kinds of choices we had a few months ago. But, I feel this wasn’t wasted, because a few months ago, maybe you weren’t in the market for more or new solutions, so this once again is topical to you.
