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Businesses exist to achieve the goals they set for themselves. How effectively they help customers accomplish their goals is where good customer service comes into the picture.

In order to provide good customer service, it’s vital to have a strong framework with a team of agents, a well-organized service process, and an outstanding customer service application. With the right customer service system, agents can streamline their entire process and deliver top-notch support to their customers.

Here is a complete guide to understanding customer service application and choosing the best solution for your business.

What is customer service software?

Customer service software is a platform that helps businesses communicate with customers, troubleshoot requests from multiple channels, and measures the effectiveness of customer service efforts. Put simply, the goal of customer service software is to ensure customers have a positive experience with your company.

To understand this better, imagine you run a hotel. Your customers may reach out with questions about rooms, services, events, reservations, cancellations, and other arrangements. They contact you via email, social media, phone call, and even live chat on your website. Your customers do not care how many others are trying to reach you. They expect you to be there for them, and rightly so.

With the help of customer service software, you can manage all incoming requests from multiple channels in one place. Requests automatically become tickets that can be categorized, prioritized, shared, assigned, and escalated. Your agents are equipped with the right tools—customer context, relevant help articles, a response editor, and more—to provide your customers with prompt and personalized attention.

Benefits of using customer service software

Regardless of the size and nature of your business, your success depends on building customer trust. Deploying customer service application early on can save you from losing customers—and revenue—in the long run. The right software can help your business:

  • Acquire new customers

    Remember, before making a purchase decision, potential customers will interact with multiple businesses. A slow response to their inquiry may cost you that customer forever. Customer support software helps you stay ahead of your competition with prompt response times.

  • Increase brand loyalty

    Your customers are more likely to stay with you if you provide a better customer experience than your competitors. A robust customer service system helps you consistently deliver high-quality customer experiences. Your most ardent customers may eventually become your brand ambassadors, leading to additional associated benefits—positive reviews, word-of-mouth publicity, more purchases, and more revenue.

  • Ensure customer happiness

    Once you have established a good relationship with your customers, you'll want to go the extra mile to turn them into long-term happy customers. Many customer service solutions help you dig deeper into customer feedback and monitor moods to better understand and support individual needs to keep the relationship afloat.

  • Improve agent efficiency

    Agent happiness can impact customer happiness. Customers have high expectations from brands, especially when it comes to customer service. Without the right tools at their disposal, agents are essentially flying blind. A good support platform helps agents work more efficiently and resolve more tickets.

  • Upsell and cross-sell

    Upselling and cross-selling are all about timing. Customer service software gives you helpful insights into a customer's purchase history with details like use cases, product feedback, and pain points. These insights help you identify opportunities to sell better and sell more.

How to choose the perfect customer service software for your business

When you browse online for customer service software, the results can be overwhelming. With so many options available, choosing the best for your business can be a challenge. Besides the obvious features list, here are some factors to consider for a wise investment:

  • Easy to use
  • Adapts with business type
  • Provides flexibility
  • Scales as you grow
  • Integrates effortlessly
  • Increases agent productivity and efficiency
  • Offers transparent pricing
  • Requires minimal training
  • Provides high-quality support
  • Keeps data secure and complies with regulations
  • The perfect choice for your business

Easy to use

Software with a shallow learning curve ensures faster agent onboarding. Essentially, software should simplify agents' work, and the agents and software should complement each other. Ease of use will vary according to your requirements (such as number of users, process complexity, and customization needs).

Adapts with every business type

Irrespective of the size and nature of your business, the best software can be molded to fit your unique business needs. Your service process reflects your business; similarly, your customer service application should reflect your service process. It should have enough customization options to suit a variety of conditions.

Provides flexibility

Flexible software runs anywhere, in any situation. Your software shouldn't hold your company back from shifting to a new platform, device, or database. It must be able to work on whatever new system you deploy, and should function on all smartphones, tablets, and PCs.

Provides flexibility

Scales as you grow

Switching platforms as your business grows is an extensive project altogether. It's important to find software that scales along with your business. Consider costs, features, and user limits for each edition to better forecast your future needs. Easily scalable software should flawlessly accommodate increases in your workforce and workload.

Integrates effortlessly

You often need multiple apps to run your operations. Your service solution must be able to integrate with these apps to ensure the seamless flow of data. This allows for agents to provide more personalized service. Your service provider must offer a wide selection of integration options that connect with your unique setup.

Integrates effortlessly

Increases agent productivity and efficiency

Collaboration and productivity capabilities can reduce agent burnout, improve internal communication, prevent agent collision, and decrease response time. Productivity tools equip agents with the right context to handle tickets efficiently, and facilitate collaboration with other teams to resolve complex issues.

Increases agent productivity and efficiency

Offers transparent pricing

Take time to compare options and find the solution with the greatest return on investment, based on your budget. Consider costs above the basic license fee, like add- ons and future upgrade costs. Choose vendors who are transparent from the outset. Watch out for any hidden costs (such as data migration, training, and support costs) and binding contracts.

Offers transparent pricing

Requires minimal training

Adopting your new platform should require minimal training, which should be free or low-cost. Establish what is required for training, and whether the basic level of training comes at an additional cost. The provider's website should have clear onboarding and advanced guides, tutorial videos, articles, FAQs, and community help forums.

Provides high-quality support

Customer service software also needs customer service. No matter how easy the software is to use, you will need support at some point. Consider the hours and channels of support offered. Basic support should be available free of cost. You can check the quality and time of responses by sending a simple email to the support team.

Keeps data secure and complies with regulations

Often overlooked, a crucial factor when considering any customer-facing software is whether it is designed to keep your customer data safe. If you deal with customers from different countries, pay attention to compliance with local regulations. Take into account everything from basic security settings and access controls to GDPR compliance features. Ensure that your business data is in safe hands. Ask about vendor's data center locations and compliance certificates.

Offers transparent pricing

The perfect choice for your business

While software with extensive features is good to have, keep your larger business goal in mind. Software with limited essential features but broad functionality goes a long way.

Zoho Desk prioritizes serving the unique needs of every business and providing the best value for your investment. Effortlessly migrate to Zoho desk with Zwitch!

We believe customer experience is an union of support, sales, and marketing efforts. Zoho CRM Plus aligns your support, sales, and marketing teams to deliver a customer-first experience to every customer.