What is Customer Service Software?
Customer service software is the program or platform a business uses to manage its customer service channels. The best customer service software helps brands manage, prioritize, and handle requests and complaints from customers - from any location, at any time, via the customer’s preferred channel.
How Does Customer Service Software Work?
Customer service software provides a centralized location for all the interactions customers have with a brand. This includes email, telephone, chatbots, social media, messaging, and self-service including FAQs and knowledge bases.
Depending on a company’s requirements, customer service software can be scalable to fit the needs of both the brand and its customers. In the case of smaller businesses, a shared inbox and phone line might suffice, but larger companies with a diverse user base may need to accommodate a wider variety of customer preferences. This could include offering live chat functionality, knowledge base software, multi-lingual and multi-brand capabilities, inbox management, and scripted chatbots.
What Are the Benefits of Customer Service Software?
Improve customer experience and boost customer satisfaction
According to PWC, 59% of customers will leave a brand after just a couple of bad experiences. By using customer service software brands can ensure they deliver a swift, seamless, professional experience to their customers, on the channels they prefer. Customers can access the information they need, exactly when they need it, resolve queries quickly, and offer feedback. They can also be alerted to offers and added value services such as guides of video demos – all from one easily accessible, integrated platform.
Improve business efficiencies
Once integrated with a CRM or CDP, Customer Service Software users benefit from a controllable database that makes business workflows more efficient, and effective. All data and customer information are accessible from one, centralized tool so agents can access the right information more quickly, and customers can self-serve with ease. This results in higher levels of customer satisfaction, improved team performance, and better use of resources. Furthermore, insights from analytics and reporting tools can highlight areas where bottlenecks are occurring, or identify other areas for improvement.
Businesses can create further efficiencies through process automation. This includes creating predefined email or text responses to common queries that are taken via the aforementioned customer communication channels. These templates are easily adapted to suit the agent’s tone of voice or to reflect the requirements of a particular customer.
Assign queries to the right people
Customer service software can be programmed so that specific queries are routed to the right agent, based on their skills, and relevancy. This approach means that queries are solved as quickly as possible, and can be prioritized, escalated, or reassigned if needed.
Improved visibility
When operating in a customer service solution such as Mobile Service Cloud, businesses can monitor every interaction, including SLAs, response times, number of conversations per agent, and much more. This enables CX leaders to set KPIs that will help agents and teams work more efficiently and effectively and continue to boost that all-important customer satisfaction.
Optimized customer service provision, from anywhere in the world
Using customer service software enables brands to operate swift, responsive, and accurate customer service 24/7/365, from any location, and on a variety of devices. Businesses can build and manage a self-serve portal enabling customers to sign in at any time, access account or product information, search the knowledge base, and request a follow-up call in just a few clicks. They can also use a scripted chatbot for common queries. While not a key driver of customer satisfaction, chatbots are a useful tool for swift query resolution, and many users find them easier to search and navigate than knowledge bases.
Scalable to suit the changing needs of your business
Ambitious businesses grow and change over time. The best customer service software has the ability to scale as your business and the needs of your customers evolve. This could mean adding SMS messaging or social media response, new payment methods, or voicebots. Whatever tools it takes to help your business thrive and keep your customers coming back for more.
