8 best customer service software to try in 2022
Customer service software can make the difference between mediocre, good, and excellent customer experiences. But deciding which tools are right for your business, choosing providers, and implementing a system is often an overwhelming task.
To help you narrow down your options, we’ll start with the basics of customer support software: what it is, the different types, and how it benefits your team. Then, we’ll wrap up with eight of the best CRM customer service software you should try in 2022.
What is customer service software?
Simply put, customer service software is a tool to help you manage support and service requests from a single, central location.
More specifically, these tools will typically improve the data handling of customer support requests. It will help you collect, analyze, and report on customer queries more effectively and accurately. You can also choose to use customer service software to manage or integrate with communication channels, including email, text, chat, and social media.
Best-in-class customer service software includes key solutions such as:
- Agent workspace third-party integration
- Case and major issue management
- Omni-channel capability
- Customer data management
- Visual workflows and automation
- Surveys, reports, and dashboards
- Issue resolution
- Agent-assist options
- Performance analytics and management
- Customer project management
An effective customer service software solution can help you improve the efficiency of your support agents, which leads to shorter customer-support response times. And customers who don’t have to wait long — are generally happier. And isn’t a happy customer the objective?
Types of Customer Service Software
There are five primary types of customer service software available. You might choose to implement more than one of these solutions, depending on your needs.
Service/Help Desk Software
Help Desk Software helps organize, manage, and respond to service-related requests. It can be used for external requests from customers or internal service requests from team members.
Some help desks even incorporate different customer service solutions into one by including tools like a shared inbox, a knowledge base, and live chat options. Others integrate with third-party providers to offer CRM software to help with customer (and agent) management.
Help Desk software enables businesses to resolve customer grievances more efficiently by automating the complaint resolution process with a ticket management system.
Basically, it lets you streamline customer conversations to create a better customer experience and agent experience.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM platforms connect all the data from your sales leads and customers in one place. It can record and analyze meetings, calls, and emails to help improve customer service, drive sales, and increase revenue.
It gives your agents access to a customer’s file to see their history, interactions, and other relevant information. A good CRM tool is vital if your business wants to track and improve customer interactions.
Messaging and Chat Tools
Messaging and Chat tools are great options if you do not require a full-featured help desk. These tools let you add a live chat box or messaging system to your website. Some systems offer chatbot options, while others put customers in touch with live support.
Shared Inbox Software
A shared inbox is a collaborative space where agents can access the same emails. Multiple accounts can be collected into one inbox. It allows your team to collaborate and respond to inquiries, complaints, and questions.
Knowledge Bases
A Knowledge Base allows your agents access to tips, tricks, and information in a searchable format to make it more accessible. Should your customer require a specific solution, your team can immediately provide them with the answers.
Typically, it’s offered in addition to tools like live chat or a help desk so that customers who can’t find the right answer on google can reach out directly to get the answers from you.
The best customer service solution for your business will be the one that helps your organization achieve its goals the most effectively. Finding the right fit for your business means you have to know the type of support experience you want your customers to have. Identifying their needs and aligning them with your objectives will help inform your choice.
The benefits of customer service software
No matter the company, or industry, an improved focus on customer support is always an advantage. Customer service software allows better support and improved customer experiences.
Improved customer renewals
Customers are likely to repeat their business with you if you provide seamless, effective support. Increased service contributed to a 0.5% improvement in customer renewals or $1.6 million in revenue.
Better ROI
Though some might consider investing in customer service software costly — the return on investment proves significant. Revenue generated through customer service software across three years compared to the cost of investment resulted in a net present value (NPV) of $8.75M and an ROI of 176%.
Increased efficiency
Dedicated support software features tailored to your business such as automated workflows, knowledge base integration, CRM, and messaging tools lets your team spend more time helping customers.
Better customer insights
Identifying, collecting, and organizing feedback, feature requests, and bug reports lead to better customer insights. And when you understand your customers better, you can help them more effectively, which improves customer satisfaction rates.
Improved teamwork
With customer service software, agents have access to all information, meaning you can reduce duplicated work. It lets you keep track of customer queries and coordinate multiple teams’ responses. This way, you can deliver up-to-date answers.
Better reporting
Customer service software collates all your data and provides you with reports on various services. It helps you to better understand changes in team productivity and customer behavior.
Improved service
Your team saves time, has access to all information, gets to work better together, and has the opportunity to improve their service. What’s not to love?
Best customer service software tools
1. Kaizo
Kaizo offers world-class coaching and development to help you quickly turn performance intelligence into impactful coaching to set each team member up for success. Powered by AI, gamification, and an advanced QA solution — you get to not only analyze the quality of your team’s performance but also coach it.
Kaizo’s customer service platform launches customer support teams with practical performance guidance to greater heights. This platform is fully integrated into Zendesk, offering you an intuitive out-the-box solution. You just need to plug, play, and instantly access real-time data. So, you can ditch the time-consuming spreadsheets and efficiently monitor, track, and guide team and individual performance.
Kaizo allows agents to actively participate in their development process in the agent training center, where they can track their performance and get guidance from their team leaders. It also allows for automated monitoring and tracking of team performance, giving you Alerts and real-time notifications, so you can take immediate corrective action.
Continuous performance improvement support aligns internal KPIs better so you can map achievement and progression while providing context around targets. To help build excitement and elevate your team’s engagement, even while working remotely, each mission successfully completed lets them level up their personal avatar.
No one slips through the cracks because you can coach faster and more frequently. Every team member gets the guidance they need. Easy to use Coaching Cards can be generated from either Agent or Team Scorecards and offer more than 50 real-time metrics to monitor, analyze, and compare performance.
2. Playvox
Playvox provides an automated & centralized agent management suite to help improve reports with real-time data from phone, chat, social media, and ticketing platforms. It provides insights into your team’s performance, including punctuality, adherence, occupancy, service levels, workstreams/queues, schedule tasks, and forecasts. They also provide quality assurance programs to assess agent performance during customer interactions to gather insights.
With Playvox you can avoid over-scheduling to reduce costs and under-scheduling to maintain customer service levels. It allows you to create and track custom KPIs to combine with standard customer service KPIs for a holistic view of your team’s performance. Improve call handling, behaviors, compliance, and soft skills.
3. Pathlight
Pathlight provides a Real-time Performance Management (RPM) platform to allow customer-facing teams to manage performance faster. It will help you analyze goals against historical trends to visualize and benchmark performance.
With automatic documentation, group metric assignments, and automated agendas, you can give leadership complete visibility about the organization. Pathlight integrates with platforms like Zendesk, StellaConnect, Lessonly, Snowflake, and Five9 and provides real-time dashboards and streamlined QA functionality and transparency.
By consolidating performance data, QA, coaching, and communication in one place, the platform empowers data-driven management at every layer of the organizational chart.
4. Tymeshift
Tymeshift allows you to improve scheduling and time management for your customer care support staff. You get to automatically create schedules that include lunch, breaks, and the specific support work your agents need to focus on throughout the day. This platform can help you improve forecasting and analytics by using all your pre-existing call volume data.
With real-time monitoring of schedule adherence to tracking unproductive times and time off, Tymeshift provides managers the transparency they need and the tools to help empower agents. Because providing your agents with detailed schedules can help them focus on one task at a time to deliver a better, more focused customer experience.
5. SupportLogic
SupportLogic helps teams evolve from reactive to proactive service delivery. Unlocking insights from unstructured data in your ticketing systems, it tracks customer sentiment in real time without surveys across multiple service channels. You can monitor cases and easily spot those that need urgent attention to fix problems before it’s too late.
With AI and NLP technology, you can gain insights into predicting and preventing escalations, improving CSAT & NPS, and reducing churn. It provides recommendations and intelligent collaborative workflows so service and support teams can take action to improve the customer experience.
6. Centrical
Centrical uses real-time employee performance data to help managers set goals tied to real-time performance data on anything from sales milestones to learning completion or performance KPIs. It keeps the goals relevant with automated updates based on actual performance, employee characteristics, or business objectives.
Each employee’s personal dashboard shows them how they’re doing in real-time. It explains how every activity they do moves them closer to their goals so they can manage their own performance. They will get prompts, training, and updates from their dashboard, telling them exactly what they need to focus on to improve their productivity and performance.
7. Stella Connect
Built for customer experience teams, Stella Connect collects agent-level feedback from customers after every service interaction. Customers can rate agents, leave comments about their experience, suggest rewards or make recommendations for areas of improvement.
It allows managers to see agent-level performance insights, providing visibility into service performance. Here, you can measure the performance against the metrics that matter most to your team, from NPS and CES to agent-level CSAT.
Within the platform, you can streamline and enhance your Quality Assurance process with predefined rules to automatically send out feedback requests after tickets are solved. You can even combine QA with real-time customer feedback for better insight.
8. Verint Monet
Verint Monet is a cloud-based workforce engagement solution that includes workforce management, quality monitoring, performance management and analytics in one. It enables you to align your people, processes, and systems to your goals and objectives, such as customer satisfaction and experience, cost control, and revenue generation.
It helps you to transform contact center management to a proactive approach. Using scorecards, KPIs, real-time alerts, agent analytics, and customizable reports, it delivers the insights needed so you can take corrective action. It automatically collects and presents real-time and historical performance data freeing up time for managers to focus on working with agents.
Choosing the right customer service software
Finding the best solution for your business starts with identifying customer needs and goals, and aligning those goals with your own objectives. So, where do you start?
Consider your budget
Some customer service software may be free, so budget won’t be an issue, but others can run costly. Though, we have already pointed out that there is a significant ROI, it doesn’t mean you can toss the account book out the window. Your employee resources such as the number of agents, may influence your decision and limit your options when it comes time to choose the right customer service platform for your business.
Define your needs
Different tools offer different capabilities. So, decide which is most important for you. If you have scheduling conflicts, issues with QA, need better training, monitoring, coaching or reporting, automating interactions, etc. Whichever you decide, the main focus needs to be improving support for your customers, and improving the performance of your team.
Consider the issues that you are currently facing, all impediments to improved performance, and decide on the platform that will solve most of your problems. It will provide you with a clear idea of how you want your customer service software to perform.
Research the options
Once you have a list of the tools and features your ideal customer service software solution needs to have, it’s time to dive into the rabbit hole. Consider everything from user reviews and recommendations, to comparisons. You can even take a look to see which platforms your competitors are using. Once you’ve narrowed down the options, it’s time to…
Take advantage of demos and trials
All platforms will either provide you with a demo, a free trial or both. So with your list of top candidates — it’s time to go directly to the source.
We may be biased, but why not start now?
