What you should look for in your customer service software

Being able to offer your customers help whenever they need it is vital to ensuring your customer service is the best that it can be. For many companies, building an outstanding customer support network involves a lot of manual work, often with support tickets being left behind, or not prioritized during a rushed day.

Having a responsive customer support team is one thing. Still, your staff needs customer service software with the best possible features, to ensure you can provide both fast response time and stay organized so that the correct department is on hand to deal with the query in question. Your customers don’t want support that is slow, sluggish, or impersonal, so consider the importance of your customer support software.

That leads us to the question: What should you look out for in your customer support software?

Let’s focus on the key aspects here and take it from a customer’s perspective. How would you like to contact your supplier/dealer when you need to discuss the product or service you use? 

You might prefer to keep away from the telephone (Most of us are much more inclined to stick to text/email support anyway). We reckon you know that trying to get help by sending emails back and forth is draining, slow, and counter-productive. That’s why you’d want a live chat feature to be available.

Our first feature to look out for is the live chat – If you have this, you’re making it much easier for your customers to reach out to you in a comfortable and simplified way. 

The main difference between live chat and email is that a live chat can generally give an instant response. If it doesn’t, you can implement a queue feature to quickly get an idea as to how long it will take before an agent picks up their query. Automatic workflows allow support requests to be dealt with immediately once a member of your team becomes available.

Another great feature to look out for is a functioning to-do list. We call this “the alternative to the standard ticketing system,” as we believe that you should want to treat your customers as real people, instead of numbers and tickets! 

Lastly, if you’re away from your desk, or need another way to get those messages relayed to your team, having a mobile application works wonders. Think about it – If you are out at the shops for your lunch and suddenly get an urgent inquiry from one of your top customers, you’re going to want to respond fast. With a mobile application, you can swiftly respond to the message or delegate the task to one of your team. Your staff can then utilize templates, notes, shared drafts, and even an approval workflow to respond to the email in question. 

There are many tools out there that do one of the jobs mentioned above. While they all have merit, we think that the separation causes more issues in the long run. One big challenge you will have is knowing which customers came in from which channel. Besides, there is no central location to see all the chat transcripts, all the emails, and the reactions to your email campaigns.

At Helpmonks, although we offer a shared inbox, it doesn’t stop there.

Helpmonks provides a dedicated CRM tool, with features like a mobile application, team to-do tools, live-chat, an email marketing platform, and automated workflows. So that your customers get the support they need from the right department at the right time. Besides, you get an email platform that gives you and your team a complete overview of every aspect of the customer.

Click here to view what’s included.