Starting a business is exciting and daunting at the same time. Most business owners focus only on producing the best product or providing top-notch services, but they forget a very important aspect of their business – customer support.
For the longest time, customer support was seen as a post-purchase service. Brands didn’t pay attention to that because of budget issues. Gradually, they soon realized that while customer support might look like a post-purchase service, it can actually impact customer engagement as well as loyalty.
Customer support is especially important for small businesses struggling with awareness, as it helps improve the reputation of the brand in the market. So, if you are a small business with a limited budget and no customer support team, keep reading. This write will help you learn about some of the simple tech tools that can make your customer support simple and easy to manage.
Before we get straight to the list, it is important for businesses to find their niche and the type of customer support they want to offer. If you own a tech company, make sure to find other noteworthy tech companies and understand their customer support. For instance, AT&T is one of the largest telecom companies in the US that is popular for offering responsive customer service, ranging from 24/7 availability and dedicated phone support. Studying how AT&T manages its support can help you to understand and build your own customer experience strategy.
- Zendesk
Recommended For: AI-powered customer experience
Standout Features: fully tailored, user-friendly, complete ticketing system with AI agents, as well as deep integrations
Price: $19 per agent/month
If you are looking for a complete customer support solution, Zendesk is the right answer for you. This software offers fast and personalized customer support regardless of the business scale.
The Zendesk platform works as a dashboard for agents and stores all basic information in the cloud. So your team can simply log in to their dashboard and fetch information about customers, their past interactions with the brand (if any), and company policy.
Apart from this, Zendesk is a complete collaboration tool that can boost teamwork. It also gets seamlessly integrated into third-party software like Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc. While Zendesk works best for support agents, it also has the reporting and analytics features that are ideal for managers and team leaders. Through this feature, team leaders can easily fetch reports or check the performance of the team with just one click.
- Intercom
Recommended For: traditional customer support
Standout Features: live chat feature, easy text automation feature, knowledge-base library, workflow automation, customer journey mapping, customizable messenger, AI-powered bots, and seamless integration with third-party tools
Price: free 14-day trial and $29 per seat/month
For small businesses that are sticking to the basics, there is no need for high-tech customer support dashboards. They can go with Intercom instead.
This customer support solution helps with customization tasks, like messages and calls. Through its messenger, businesses can easily support their existing tools, and you can manage and customize workflow as well.
Intercom also allows a business inquiry redirecting option, so the agent can easily direct calls based on the customer history, skills required to handle the call, and the availability of the agent. This tool can also generate automated tickets via different channels, like email, and then share the ticket in the inbox.
The AI feature available on Intercom is ideal for conversational support. This tool not only offers answers to the FAQ’s but also helps in summarizing each conversation.
- Tidio
Recommended For: startups
Standout Features: live chat feature, chat automation, AI-powered support, and unified inbox, seamless customer interactions; automate responses, and boost customer support efficiency
Price: free with limited features
A perfect customer support platform for small and midsize businesses, Tidio has a complete ticketing system. This tool mainly allows users to not just collect but also filter, manage, and organize messages received from the customer in the inbox. This tool can simply turn the emails, live chats, and social media texts from the customers into tickets.
Each ticket is tagged based on its priority and skills requirement, and it is then assigned to the agent accordingly. Finally, when the interaction between agent and customer is over, a review-based survey is triggered for the customer.
- Zoho Desk
Recommended For: seamless integration with other Zoho tools
Standout Features: ticket management system, omnichannel support, workflow automation, customized features, reporting and analytics, and seamless integration with Zoho applications
Price: 5-day free trial and $7 per user/month
Saving the best for last, we have Zoho Desk. This tool needs no introduction, as it is a full-stream tool with every possible customer support feature you can ever think of.
Zoho Desk offers complete customer support features along with automation options. The best thing about this tool is the single-view dashboard that allows agents to handle everything in one place and make their work easier.
The dashboard also includes a ticket management system that helps in organizing tickets along with the due date, priority, and work status. Plus, this tool has useful features, like SLA, AI, reply editor, analytics, and more. With just one key, anyone can generate a report or check analytics at any point. Apart from this, the tool can be integrated with other Zoho tools for a more holistic work ecosystem.
Simply put, customer support is very important for business, but training and organizing a whole team can be challenging. The above-mentioned tools can help you not just save money but also make the most out of your customer support.
