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Find Must-Have Helpdesk Tools inside Gmail
10 Must-Have Customer Support Tools to Include in Your Tech Stack in 2024
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“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder, Amazon.
We couldn’t agree more.
Over the years, the relationship between businesses and consumers has changed considerably. Back in the day, price was a huge competitive differentiator.
Fast forward to today, price continues to matter. However, there’s another huge differentiating factor, and that’s customer service.
Is customer service really that important? According to a recent Hiver survey, 72% of customers switch brands after just one negative customer experience.
In the same survey, we found out that 52% of customers want their queries resolved in 24 hours.
The takeaway is simple: customers want experiences that are memorable and effortless.
And to meet these expectations, companies need to invest in the right technology. Tools that can make your teams more efficient, empower them to work smartly, and ultimately help create world-class experiences for the end customer.
We’ve, therefore, compiled a list of 10 essential customer service tools. Let’s dive into what these tools are, why you need them, and how they can add value to your business.
Table of Contents
- What is a customer support tool?
- 10 essential customer support tools to power your business
- Customer support tools set your teams up for success
- FAQs
What is a customer support tool?
A customer support tool is a technology that helps support teams streamline complaints, queries, and requests and respond to them in a timely manner.
Customer support tools come in handy as businesses scale. The more customers you add, the more queries your support team is bound to receive. When this happens, you need some tools and processes that can help your support staff handle such large volumes of work.
Customer support tools not only reduce the load on your support team but make it easy for customers to reach out to you for help.
In this post, we’re going to look at a wide range of support teams – from email helpdesks to live chat solutions to knowledge base software.
10 essential customer support tools to power your business
We’ve done the groundwork for you — here’s a round-up of our top tools:
| Tool Category | Description | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Help Desk Ticketing System | Centralizes, assigns, and tracks customer queries. | Hiver, Zoho Desk, Zendesk |
| Knowledge Base Software | Enables self-service with FAQs, videos, and tutorials. | Hiver, ProProfs, Helpjuice |
| Live Chat Software | Facilitates real-time communication, improving customer engagement. | Hiver, Pure Chat, ThriveDesk, ProProfsChat, LiveChat |
| Social Listening and Monitoring Tool | Monitors brand sentiment on social media. | Hootsuite, Sprout Social |
| Customer Feedback Survey Tool | Gathers feedback through surveys, utilizing metrics like NPS and CSAT. | SurveyMonkey, Typeform |
| Internal Communication Software | Facilitates quick and contextual communication within support teams. | Slack, Microsoft Teams, Hiver’s Email Notes |
| Project Management Tool | Helps organize and prioritize tasks across different communication channels. | ClickUp, ClientVenue, Asana, Timely Time Tracker |
| Reporting Dashboard | Provides interactive dashboards for analyzing customer support metrics. | Hiver’s Reporting and Analytics, Qualtrics, Databox |
| Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software | Manages customer interactions, stores details, and enhances accessibility. | HubSpot, Salesforce |
| AI Email Management Software | Sorts, prioritizes and helps you respond to emails in a more efficient manner. | Intercom, Sanebox |
1. Help desk ticketing system
Do you have customer messages, requests, and complaints coming in from various communication channels such as email, live chat, IVR, and social media?
That’s when you need a help desk. It’s a tool that helps you centralize, assign, and track all incoming customer queries.
A help desk ticketing system allows customer service teams to log support tickets, streamline support workflows, automate the process of routing tickets to the right agents, and work collaboratively to reduce response time and deliver excellent customer service.
Some popular help desk software include Hiver, Zoho Desk, and Zendesk.
But, if you’re looking for a help desk that is extremely easy to use and can be set up in minutes, try out Hiver. The best part about Hiver is that it works within Gmail, and so your support team doesn’t have to learn another new software.
2. Knowledge base software
We live in the era of ‘Googling It’, where people are used to looking for answers on the internet. In fact, that’s the first thing that most people do before they take their query elsewhere.
According to Harvard Business Review, 81% of customers across industries attempt to resolve issues on their own before contacting a live representative.
By investing in a knowledge base software tool, you can create, manage and share self-service content in the form of FAQs pages, how-to-videos, and step-by-step tutorials. One of the biggest benefits of having a knowledge base is that it brings down the workload of your support team, as customers can look for answers themselves.
Your support team can also refer to the knowledge base while answering common queries — this improves response time as frontline agents don’t have to figure out solutions/answers from scratch.
If you’re looking to invest in a knowledge base, Hiver, ProProfs, and Helpjuice are great options to consider.
3. Live chat software
Live chat software is another essential customer support tool your team needs.
Why? According to Invesp, customers who use live chat spend 60% more per purchase than those who don’t. Further, 77% of customers will not make a purchase if there’s no live chat support.
Live chat can help you communicate with your customers in real-time – whether they visit your website or your mobile app. It can help you provide immediate and proactive support to your customers.
Having said that, a poorly designed live chat experience is worse than not having live chat support. Which is why we’ve put together a checklist of Do’s and Don’ts when you offer Live Chat as a support channel.
Hiver, Pure Chat, ThriveDesk, ProProfsChat, and LiveChat are some popular live chat software you can check out.
4. Social listening and monitoring tool
Are you keeping an eye on online conversations about your brand? How do customers perceive your products and services on social media?
Social listening and monitoring tools can help a great deal in tracking brand sentiment amongst your customer base. Using these tools, you can closely track what customers are saying about your brand and your competitors — you can then leverage these insights to provide more personalized experiences. Monitoring brand mentions will also help you identify customer complaints and respond to them quickly before they mount up into a thread of negative feedback about your brand.
Hootsuite and Sprout Social are our personal favorites when it comes to social listening and monitoring tools.
5. Customer feedback survey tool
Surveys have been in use from time immemorial, and they are one of the most useful tools to gather customer feedback.
Knowing your customers is important to your success, including when it comes to choosing a tech stack. Sending out a customer feedback survey to understand people’s thoughts about your products can provide you useful insights into your product as well as your support quality and performance.
Typically, every customer feedback survey comes with a set of questions that are related to a specific metric. These customer experience metrics include the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT),and Customer Effort Score (CES).
Two commonly used tools to send follow-up feedback surveys are SurveyMonkey and Typeform.
6. Internal communication software
Oftentimes, customer support teams need to communicate with other internal teams while working on queries. This is why it is important to equip them with an easy-to-use internal communication tool that can be supplemented with a screen recorder.
The advantage of using such a tool is that it allows your frontline agents to have quick, contextual discussions with other employees from the same team and also with employees across different functions.
Hiver’s Email Notes, for instance, helps you write a note to anyone in the organization and ask for input. As a result, you don’t have to depend on emails for communication all the time. That’s one way to reduce clutter!
Other tools that can help with internal communication include Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Fellow.app.
7. Project management tool
Delivering great customer service depends on your customer service team’s ability to handle multiple projects at once. This brings up the need for a project management tool that can help you organize, prioritize, and track the progress of your team’s tasks spread across different customer communication channels.
In other words, you need 360-degree visibility into what’s happening, and that’s where a project management tool can help. It allows you to share important documents and collaborate with multiple stakeholders involved in resolving a customer query. It helps support teams track individual tasks and deadlines and empowers them to deliver great support.
In project management tools, our vote goes to ClickUp, ClientVenue, Asana, and Timely Time Tracker.
Pro tip: If you’re using Asana, you can now manage and track projects right within Gmail using Hiver’s Asana integration.
8. Reporting dashboard
The ideal way to analyze the quality of customer support is through interactive dashboards that showcase critical metrics.These metrics provide detailed insights into how your support team is interacting with customers and how this is impacting larger outcomes such as loyalty and retention.
Robust and in-depth analytics is a must-have so that you can slice and dice data as you please and really analyze things in a detailed, thorough manner.
That’s exactly what Vacasa – an international vacation rental management company – did. Ever since they started using Hiver’s analytics dashboard, their teams handle support emails 80% faster.
Other tool recommendations for crunching data and creating customer service reports include Qualtrics and Databox.
Did You know:
Customer Service Software Market Size is touted to touch USD 58.1 Billion by 2030, according to Acumen Research and Consulting.
9. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software
CRMs are built to help teams across the board manage customer interactions with ease.
For customer support teams, CRM software help in storing customer details, recording customer queries, and tracking the progress of support issues. What’s more, a CRM provides a centralized database that lets multiple team members access important customer information – from past orders and chat history to ongoing requests.
It makes data about any customer interaction available to any team member who may need it. A CRM is not just useful in tracking data and making it more accessible but can impact larger metrics like retention. For instance, investing in a CRM can help increase customer retention by 27%!
HubSpot and Salesforce are great examples of popular CRMs. If you’re in the B2B space, you might want to invest in a tool like TinyEmail for prospecting.
10. AI Email Management Tools
AI-powered email management tools utilise artificial intelligence to help teams sort, prioritize, and respond to emails in a hassle-free, efficient manner. Such a tool is useful in streamlining both internal and external communication as well as driving visibility and ownership across the team. Additionally, it adapts and learns from user behavior over time, becoming more effective at predicting preferences and needs.
A great example of AI email management software is Sanebox. Intercom is another popular tool with very powerful AI capabilities.
Recommended Read: 8 Best AI Email Management Tools in 2024
Customer support tools set your teams up for success
Help your teams become more efficient by implementing a mix of these customer service tools. Be it a help desk software to streamline customer requests or a tool to collect feedback, always keep in mind the end goal – to delight customers and provide memorable experiences. In the same spirit of enhancing team efficiency, choosing board management software is crucial for streamlined decision-making and effective governance, especially in today’s fast-paced business environment.
Now, if you use Google Workspace and are looking for the right customer service software to support your customers, then we’ve got just what you need.
Hiver – the world’s first help desk designed for Google Workspace – helps several global brands deliver fast and human customer service right from their Gmail inbox. What’s better, it even comes with built-in analytics, live chat, CSAT surveys, collaboration features, automation functionalities, and more!
Curious to find out how the tool works? Get a free 7-day trial of Hiver today!
FAQs
- How can a help desk ticketing system benefit customer service teams?
- A help desk ticketing system centralizes, assigns, and tracks all incoming customer queries. It streamlines support workflows, automates ticket routing, and facilitates collaborative efforts to reduce response time and enhance customer service.
- Why does the article recommend Hiver as a help desk software?
- Hiver is recommended for its user-friendly interface, quick setup within Gmail, and features that make it easy for support teams to handle customer queries efficiently.
- What role does a knowledge base software play in customer support, and which tools are recommended in the article?
- Knowledge base software enables self-service with FAQs, videos, and tutorials, reducing the workload on support teams. Recommended options include Hiver, ProProfs, and Helpjuice.
- Why is live chat software considered an essential customer support tool?
- Live chat software facilitates real-time communication, and statistics indicate that customers who use live chat spend 60% more per purchase. Examples mentioned in the article include Hiver, Pure Chat, ThriveDesk, ProProfsChat, and LiveChat.
- How can social listening and monitoring tools contribute to customer support?
- Social listening and monitoring tools help track brand sentiment on social media, allowing businesses to provide more personalized experiences and respond quickly to customer feedback. Hootsuite and Sprout Social are recommended tools.
- What is the significance of customer feedback surveys, and which tools are suggested for sending follow-up surveys?
- Customer feedback surveys are crucial for gathering insights into product and support quality. SurveyMonkey and Typeform are recommended tools for sending follow-up feedback surveys.
- How does internal communication software, such as Hiver’s Email Notes, contribute to efficient customer support?
- Internal communication software facilitates quick and contextual discussions within support teams, reducing dependence on emails and minimizing clutter. Hiver’s Email Notes is mentioned as a tool for collaborative communication.
- Why does the article emphasize the use of a project management tool in customer support?
- A project management tool helps organize, prioritize, and track tasks across different communication channels, providing 360-degree visibility into support team activities. Recommended tools include ClickUp, ClientVenue, Asana, and Timely Time Tracker.
- What role does a reporting dashboard play in customer support, and which tools are recommended for creating customer service reports?
- A reporting dashboard provides interactive insights into customer support metrics, aiding in analysis. Recommended tools for creating customer service reports include Hiver’s Reporting and Analytics, Qualtrics, and Databox.
- How does Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software contribute to customer support, and which popular CRMs are mentioned in the article?
- CRM software helps manage customer interactions, store details, and enhance accessibility of customer information. HubSpot and Salesforce are cited as examples of popular CRMs.
- What is unique about Hiver as a customer service tool for Google Workspace users?
- Hiver is highlighted as the world’s first help desk designed for Google Workspace. It enables fast and human customer service directly from the Gmail inbox, offering features like analytics, live chat, CSAT surveys, collaboration, and automation functionalities.
- How can businesses explore Hiver, and what is the offer mentioned in the article?
- Businesses can explore Hiver by getting a free 7-day trial. The article encourages readers to try out Hiver for fast and human customer service directly from Gmail.
