Customer service can be a crucial asset when it comes to increasing revenue. If your customer service is lacking, people may go elsewhere. If it's great, you can retain customers for life. This is why using customer service tools can be essential to a business.
Here are 10 web-based customer service tools that your business could be using to help streamline and improve your customer service approach.
1. Zendesk
Customer service software often starts with a help-desk solution. A help desk is software designed to collect, assign and track communication about the product or customer. Help-desk software can be used for support, internal communication and many other things.
How often do you get emails from people asking questions about how your product works? Instead of wasting time typing the same emails over and over, consider using a knowledge-base system like Zendesk.
Zendesk allows you to create knowledge bases quickly, allowing you to create FAQs, user guides and other important information for people who have your product. This saves you time when you can point people towards the knowledge base in a support email or, better yet, they find the answer on their own.
A knowledge base isn't just for your current customers, it's also helpful for prospective customers. People making purchases are more likely to research the product thoroughly before buying. There may be a good chance these potential buyers are looking for a product that solves a very specific problem or has a specific feature—knowledge bases can help you make those features easier to discover.
2. Intercom Acquire Live Chat
If you sell a digital product, you're probably keenly aware of your cart abandonment rate, and may be struggling with reducing it.
The Baymard Web Usability Institute compiled 34 different studies and found the average cart abandonment rate was 68.8 percent. (The rate was last updated in October 2016.) Or, put another way: for every 10 people shopping online that have added a product into their shopping cart, only three people may actually buy it.
Shopping cart abandonment happens for a slew of reasons, and each reason can be different for each customer. Was there not enough information? Was the sales copy confusing? Did the product not have a specific feature that the buyer desperately needed?
You can be proactive against shopping cart abandonment by using a live chat service like Intercom Acquire. Intercom Acquire allows you to initiate a conversation with a potential buyer via website chat. You can ask if they have questions, or give them an opportunity to ask you right there on the page. If you're not available to chat, you can capture leads to follow up with when you're back online.
Live chat can be instrumental to the sales process because it allows buyers to ask questions right there, without leaving your site. Prospective buyers can be hard (and expensive) to get back. Engaging in a helpful conversation before they leave can be a great way to retain some of those lost sales.
3. Uservoice
Feedback can be vital for your company. Are there bugs you're not seeing? Is your product behaving the way it's supposed to? Or maybe you need to know what product to build next. A great way to figure that out is by asking.
Uservoice is a feedback solution that allows site owners to add feedback forms directly on their website. The forms allow you to ask for ratings of your service, as well as a way to allow customers to submit product ideas.
4. Salesforce
Salesforce is the granddaddy of online customer relationship management (CRM) software. It can essentially be a one-stop shop for running the customer side of your business.
Some examples of Salesforce's capabilities? You can automatically send emails when a stage of a deal is done, store confidential documents, browse and collect leads and more. In fact, it has thousands of apps across nearly every industry, so you can get incredibly specialized in finding a CRM workflow for your specific needs.
5. Groove
Groove calls itself “simple help desk software." The software allows you to pull in emails, live chats, social media posts and calls into a ticketing system, which can help you organize your support requests.
Groove also provides a knowledge base solution that helps businesses compile helpful information about their product or service.
6. Freshdesk
Because help desks and ticketing systems are so vital to customer support, I'm going to tell you about one more: Freshdesk.
Freshdesk has a robust ticketing service that allows individuals or teams to pull in all sorts of support requests from different channels: email, phone, social networks and live chat. Another key aspect of Freshdesk is the ability to use automation dispatch tickets. This automation can help cut down the amount of tickets that have to be manually sorted.
7. CloudApp
There's that old saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words." That saying could be updated to say “a screenshot is worth a thousand-word support email."
CloudApp is a service that helps you easily take screenshots on your computer and share them with your team. You can quickly show other members in your team what you're seeing on your computer, or you could share that screenshot with a customer in a support request.
8. ScreenConnect
Sometimes sharing an image of what you're seeing isn't enough in a support scenario. Sometimes you need to be inside the customer's computer.
ScreenConnect is a service that gives you the ability to connect to a customer's computer and fix problems remotely. You log in to ScreenConnect, and once the person needing support gives you access, you can then securely access their computer. ScreenConnect offers compatibility with any device or platform, which means you can remotely access your customer's phones, tablets or computers—with their permission, of course.
9. Adobe Sign
Here's something that annoys everyone with a business: having to send faxes. But contracts have to be signed, and a common (and cumbersome) way to send them is by fax machine.
Adobe Sign lets you sidestep the fax machine altogether and just use email. You can fill out the form using Adobe Reader, and sign the document with an e-signature, which is 100 percent legal and secure. Then a copy of the signed document is sent to both parties, allowing you to go back to working on something much more important than remembering how to work the fax machine.
10. Slack
Slack is a messaging app for teams that's like a more powerful Google Chat. You can send direct messages or have a chat room. These messages are indexed and searchable, and can be tagged and sorted.
If you work on a collaborative team, Slack could be helpful in cutting down email. Slack's internal data compiled March 2016 says that they've reduced internal email by nearly 49 percent, reduced meetings by 25 percent and improved team productivity by 32 percent.
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