In today’s customer-centric world, businesses must ensure their customer service teams are equipped with flexible & powerful customer service tools to do the job right. 

Customer service can literally make or break a business. For example. one angry, neglected customer can result in a negative review across multiple platforms. Likewise, one negative review, in turn, can cause a loss of five good customers. 

With multiple customer touchpoints, businesses must make use of tools that let their teams provide optimal service on all platforms. Be it on call, via email, social messaging, or even live chats – it follows that customer service must happen at all customer touchpoints. 

So, here’s a quick list of the top 5 customer service tools, each categorized according to a service touchpoint. 

1. Help Scout – For the All-in-One Customer Service

If your customer service is scattered over multiple channels & platforms – i.e, social media, live chat, emails, calls, etc, you’ll need a customer service tool that gives you the ability to manage all these platforms in an omnichannel experience. 

Help Scout is a popular customer service tool that lets teams manage shared inboxes, create and manage knowledgebase, manage live chats and generate reports for team performance. 

The key benefit of using Help Scout is its integration with over 50+ platforms. Whether it’s Salesforce, Jira, Hubspot, MailChimp, Shopify to WooCommerce, you can bring all of your channels under one platform. 

Key Features:

• Firstly, customer management (customer data, previous conversations, app activities, etc). 
• Trigger-based in-app messaging to engage leads and onboard new customers. 
• Integrations with 50+ platforms to get a consolidated customer view. 
• Real-time data reporting including average response time for each query. 
• Provide live-chat support, integrate help center articles, all in the same tool. 

Pricing:

Starts at $20/user/month 

2. CallRail – For Call-based Customer Service

Traditionally, companies use the same phone number on all their marketing communications: website, online ads, billboards, etc.

The problem is when a call comes in, nobody knows which marketing channel or campaign prompted that call. Did they hear of the company through Yelp, an organic Facebook post, in a marketing email, or from the top of a Taxi?

CallRail tells companies which marketing campaign generated which call by cleverly showing different phone numbers in different ads.

Key Features and Benefits:

• Integrations with existing platforms: With hundreds of integrations available, you can easily connect your CallRail account and activity to your existing tools for bid management, online analytics, CRM, and more.
• Agency Friendly: We work with agencies to help scale for the number of customers they are serving, provide volume discounts and allow agencies to white-label with ease.
• 14-Day Free Trial: Give us a shot for 14-days- we’re sure you’ll love the ease of use and user-friendly interface of our powerful application.
• No Contract, No Hidden Fees: We believe in being transparent in the pricing and being the solution that works for your organization.
• Call Reporting & Analytics: Know which campaigns and channels are driving calls to your sales desk.

Pricing:

Starts from $45 a month/user. 

3. Loom – For Personalised Video Customer Service

In a world where customer service is traditionally seen as a cost center — yet customers demand faster and better support every day — Support teams must revamp their workflows to harness efficiency while keeping interactions personal.

This is where video communication with Loom comes in!

And while sending your customers videos in the reactive support process is great, building video-first behavior by proactively encouraging your customers to send you videos in the support process is where the real efficiency lies.

Key Features:

• Key features of Loom include online video sharing, customizable branding, encryption, collaboration, commenting, and animation previews.
• Designed for engineering, sales, customer success, leadership, and customer service teams, Loom allows users to duplicate or trim video copies, send personalized videos, and receive notifications for every view.
• Plus, it allows teams to enable “do not disturb” mode whilst recording on Mac devices, in order to avoid unnecessary interruptions.

Pricing:

Free and then from $8 per month.

4. timetoreply – for Email-based Customer Service 

Despite the rise of chat tools and instant messaging, email remains a convenient and proactive customer service tool. Yet, companies have been unable to keep track of their email performance. 

The modern customer demands almost instant attention. However, statistics show, that companies take on average, 12 hours to respond to an email. Likewise, with 88% of customers expecting a response from your business within 60 minutes, a 12-hour average is not a pleasant experience. 

timetoreply is a tool designed to help you manage your team’s email response times. You’ll get reports on the time your sales or service/success agents take to respond to a query, the performance of each agent, and email volumes.  

Moreover, the real-time alerts also mean that you can set timetoreply up to alert you about any missed priority emails, or emails waiting on a response.

With timetoreply, you can easily keep track of your team performance while allowing you to get visibility in processes that hinder your teams from doing their best.

Key Features:

• Manage customer service and sales teams in one platform
• Improve email reply times and qualify more leads 
• Get deeper insights into team performance 
• Real-time alerts that let you know when an important email has not received a reply after X amount of time 
• Integrate with your CRMs and business intelligence reporting tools 

Pricing:

Starts at $14/mailbox/month.

5. Buffer for Business – for Social Media Customer Service 

Buffer is widely recognized as a social media management tool, but lately, it has also transformed into a powerful social media customer service tool. 

The Business tool allows users to Publish, Reply, Analyze engagement from multiple social media accounts. Moreover, with a grid view, you can quickly jump from post to post, be notified of comments that are questions or have negative sentiments, respond to customers instantly, assign tasks to teammates, and much more. 

If you’re a B2C business with a highly active social media presence, Buffer is a good tool to start with customer service management. 

Features:

• Identify posts that have unanswered comments. Quickly move from one post to another in a grid view interface. 
• A smart machine learning system that alerts users to negative comments or questions. 
• Increase efficiency and speed of response with hotkeys and emojis 

Pricing:

Free and then from $5/month/per social channel.

—

Ready to roll out these Customer Service tools?

In conclusion, customer service is no longer about generic responses. It’s an integrated component of a successful business. If you do not invest in the right tools, you’re neglecting your customers and if that happens – well, your business is losing money by the minute. 

Schedule a demo now and discover the future of elevated communication strategies!