Web based customer support is at long last being widely

embraced by the customer support world. After all of my time complaining endlessly about how outmoded call centers are, and how much better off we’d be going digital, it seems like people are seeing the light. Is it partly due to my … insightful writing? Well heck, my ego says yes, so I’ll just agree with it.

So, you’re finally ready to embrace web based customer support, and make the world a better place for everyone. First of all, on behalf of the consumerist world, thank you. Second of all, you’re probably wondering what software to choose, considering this is a novel idea to those accustomed, grudgingly, to the call center model as a centric method.

I’m here to help, and I’m going to recommend three of the top customer support SaaS suites out there, for you. I’m not going to be gentle, and try to reach a broad demographic by being sensitive to pocket books here, some of these do cost a good bit of money. But, it’s so worth it that I’m not going to bother massaging that. This is an area where you just do not skimp.

#1 – WalkMe

Hubris? Absolutely not, just fact. WalkMe is one of the three best customer support systems out there, and I’m going to tell you why in very simple terms. It’s easy to set up, it’s easy to configure, and it works.

Created as an interactive tutorial extension to integrate into web services, WalkMe is an excellent tool for the self-service philosophies which are also, thank heaven, being adopted now. It’s smart, content-aware and capable of live-intervening to help users handle their own problems. It can also be programmed to be a live debugging tool, to show where users have the most issues.

WalkMe is actually one of the more affordable systems on here, too.

#2 – Desk.com

This is less self-service and more based on the help desk model. At one point, I hated help desk models, because they were an ugly hybrid of forum and email correspondence, often manned by slow apathetic agents.

This has changed, with the very live nature of the internet today, and the embrace of freelance professionals in business. Desk.com is probably the most intuitive and standard CRM system for those wanting to go SaaS. It’s expensive, but again, no skimping on customer service, you!

#3 – Freshdesk

This one’s oddly overpriced for what it is, and it’s not as feature-rich as Desk.com, nor as clever as WalkMe, and yet it’s one of the trifecta. How can this be, you might ask?

Well, Freshdesk is all about social customer support, focusing on integration with things like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Tumblr, as well as crowdsourcing models and forum systems.

If you want to go this direction with your customer support, they’re the easiest and most competent system for it, most likely.

Web based customer support is the future, phones are a relic of a bygone era. I’ve been saying this for a while, as have most of my colleagues, and we are overjoyed to at long last see that others are saying it too.