Full Guide to Small Business Customer Service 2023 Update

We first looked at overall features crucial to any customer service software for small business, regardless of its primary use case or function served. These include workflow management tools, communication channels, ticketing systems, shared inboxes, and email templates. We also wanted to see mobile customer service functionality, a wide range of third-party integrations, and robust reporting and analytics tools available. The platform is highly customizable, allowing businesses to tailor it to their needs and aesthetic preferences.

• Customers love it when a company makes them feel special and appreciated and rewarding their loyalty is one of the best ways to do that.
• Small businesses often have complex communication demands, especially communication-centric businesses like contact centers, making customer support solutions imperative.
• Salesforce Service Cloud is a cloud-based customer service platform designed for enterprise businesses with complex needs.
• To determine the best customer service system, we evaluated the specific features relevant to assisting and communicating with customers.

Like any other tool we discussed above, Kayako has everything your team would want to operate seamlessly. Together with out-of-the-box help desk with sharing, duplicate reduction, and collaboration options, you Chat GPT also get live chat software for engaging customer experience. Building a positive, long-term relationship with buyers starts with developing a customer service experience that can constantly be improved upon.

Our ratings consider factors such as transparent pricing, pipeline and dashboard customization options, compatibility with third-party integrations, access to customer support and user experience. Your support tools should offer the ability to manage communications through all of the channels that are widely used by your customers. In this blog, we delve into ten customer service software options that are well-suited for small businesses. These tools have been selected for their ease of use, cost-effectiveness, and features that can make a real difference in how small businesses interact with their customers. When choosing customer service solutions, you should consider your business needs and the capabilities of the specific platforms.

Agents can prioritize tickets, automate tasks, and tag teammates into the conversation. It also has a free live chat tool that you can use to install chatbots and expand the bandwidth of your customer service team. Service Hub is an excellent pick for businesses of all sizes, but it establishes itself as one of the best small business customer service software options because of this.

Comparison chart of the top customer service software solutions

Agents can view a customer’s ticket history and export conversations as PDFs. It also features private notes for users to collaborate through side conversations. Collision detection can help avoid having multiple agents unknowingly work on the same ticket. Bitrix24’s built-in video calling allows agents and customers to connect face-to-face when resolving issues. With screen sharing and recording, agents can demonstrate solutions, walk customers through steps, and capture sessions for reference or training. There’s also videoconferencing for broader team collaboration, enabling group discussions with up to 48 people at a time.

That means every employee has the same information in real-time, and can make updates wherever they are. Whether they’ve previously reached out via phone, chat, email, or social media, a single source of truth ensures everyone at your company can provide the expected level of service. Customer relationship management software can benefit virtually any department at your company, from sales to service, to IT, to marketing, and more. Whether you want to start big or start small, it’s easier to get started than you might think. The focus of each CRM software solution varies from project management tools to marketing automation to lead generation, so look for the specs that fit your requirements.

You can get a free trial for 21 days, and pricing starts at free and goes up to $83 per user per month. Paid plans include features such as multicurrency support, advanced reporting and analytics, business process workflows, deal management and holiday routing. Zoho CRM offers everything you need to manage your sales pipeline and grow your business. It allows businesses of all sizes to customize their process, create sales workflows and leverage powerful reporting.

So where do we draw the line between formal and casual while working from home? Imagine how much quicker and more effective your service can be when you have a holistic and complete view of the customer’s entire journey at your fingertips. As of May 2023, LiveAgent supports 43 languages, including English, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, French, German, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese. Zoho Desk accepts multiple currencies across all of its different product lines. For Zoho Desk, it accepts US Dollars (USD), Euro (EUR), British Pound (GBP), Australian Dollar (AUD), and a few others.

Strategy #3: Involve the whole company

It also provides a full suite of apps that integrate with the platform for marketing, customer support, accounting, human resources and inventory management, provided you have a paid plan. Intercom is yet another trusted name in the customer service software category. It allows users to offer customer support through live chat, email, and self-service platforms. Customer service can be best managed using customer service, help desk, or contact center software. You can also use a CRM solution, such as Bitrix24, that comes with service tools such as queue and conversation management and client profile storage.

We will note, however, that the AI functionality is only available on the higher-cost omnichannel support plans. To help you get a jump-start on finding the support tool that’s just right for your team, we’ve put together this list of tools that range from help and service desks to social media management solutions. While many CS solutions integrate with diverse communication channels, contact centers should also look for solutions that offer additional integrations with third-party tools. These integrations can streamline data syncing and automate workflows across different platforms, significantly improving agent performance.

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Without the insights from the people who spend the most time with your customers, it’s an incredibly difficult task to accomplish. Discover the tools and techniques used by high-performing customer service organizations in our free, six-part video course. One way to remedy that is to shine a light on it, and company meetings are a great forum to do just that. By putting customer service stats like CSAT or NPS front and center with other high-level metrics like revenue or customer growth, it can signal just how important they are.

Whether it’s from documents, phone calls, social media chats, or anything else, you’re looking for a solution that can grab data from all the key channels you’re using to interact with customers. Parsing and routing data comprise the other half, and that can get tricky. Over the last couple of years, however, CRM vendors have begun directly addressing the needs of small business buyers. Some have built brand-new products with new interfaces and features designed from the ground up with small and micro-business users in mind. Others have pared down their flagship products to make them easier to use while keeping an upgrade path easy for growing customers. We put top players in the small business CRM space through their paces in this roundup.

And, when your onboarding is clear and easy-to-follow, you can decrease churn early on in the customer journey. For example, marketers can use CRM tools to manage campaigns and lead customer journeys with a data-driven approach. CRM software provides visibility into every opportunity or lead, showing you a clear path from inquiries to sales. Then, commerce teams can serve up personalized offers on your website, while customer service already knows a customer’s history if they reach out with questions. Keap helps you convert leads through advanced marketing campaigns and save time through workflow automations and payment integration. Features include lead & Client management, sales pipeline, and analysis, text marketing, and email marketing.

Providing excellent customer service sounds so simple but it’s quite difficult to do. Businesses make customer service mistakes for many reasons, from inadequate tools and training to not understanding what customers need. The quality of your service has a direct, often swift, influence on the success or failure of your brand. Desk365 enables support agents to track ticket progress from submission to resolution, ensuring transparency and accountability. Desk365’s responsive mobile version allows support teams to address customer inquiries anytime, anywhere, ensuring exceptional support even on the go.

Performance monitoring in your service operation is vital for goal tracking, coaching, and capacity planning. Zoho Desk has excellent features for ensuring customer satisfaction and quality agent performance, such as feedback widgets, customer happiness rating, and performance monitoring. These features are not only advanced, but they’re cost-effective—with a majority of the analytics tools available on the free and low-tiered plans. By integrating Salesforce with ActiveCampaign, you can automatically update contact information in ActiveCampaign based on changes in Salesforce, ensuring your customer data is always current.

However, you really can’t afford to put the customer experience on the back burner. People on both sides of the chat can attach files in the widget and even send emojis and GIFs. Much like RingCentral, HubSpot Service Hub lets you access your call, chat, and email interactions all in one place in a user-friendly system. Some languages include English, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese (Simplified). Freshdesk supports a broad range of languages to accommodate its diverse customer base.

Other Zoho Desk features include self-service resources, SLAs, AI, an advanced response editor, and built-in analytics. The platform allows you to track customer data and generate reports with key performance metrics. Users can also create dashboards to visualize and track specific ticket metrics. Front is a customer service solution that allows users to configure automated workflows and integrate additional channels into a shared inbox. It automatically consolidates customer inquiries across channels and routes messages to the best-suited agent. Our customer service software is easy to use, maximizing productivity and ensuring you can move at the speed of your customers.

This can also enable you to segment your audience and send targeted marketing messages based on interactions with your sales and customer service teams. Additionally, these platforms come equipped with powerful analytics and reporting tools, enabling businesses to derive actionable insights from their customer interactions. The ability to scale as a business grows is another common trait, making these solutions adaptable to the changing needs of an organization. Customer service software is any technological tool or platform designed to enhance customer interactions, streamline service operations, and foster improved customer satisfaction. The main objective of this type of software is to manage and process customer inquiries, support requests, or complaints effectively and efficiently, from initial contact to resolution. Using this approach, enterprise CRM players set themselves up for two benefits.

Tidio also has a conversational AI chatbot, Lyro, that can assist customers with automated support. Zendesk offers award-winning customer service software that empowers businesses to deliver fast and personalized customer support at scale. Customer service software is a set of tools designed to help businesses track, manage, organize, and respond to customer support requests at scale.

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The good news is that there is customer service software to fit any budget. If you’re looking for software that can help scale your service team, take a look at the next section for a list of free tools that you can use. Kustomer uses a timeline feature to display your customers’ data in one easy-to-understand report.

The support team should help customers achieve success with your product, thus convincing them to remain with you. There are a few different ways you can approach building out and scaling your customer service team. Knowing why customer service matters for your small business and having strategies to deliver great service are both incredibly important. That said, in order to put those learnings into action, you need a great team.

With the right tool, small businesses can keep track of customer conversations, respond promptly to inquiries, and ensure issues are resolved to the customer’s satisfaction. Sales and support teams use Nextiva to deliver a better customer experience. Call centers need strong, scalable customer support solutions that can handle diverse channels and high customer contact volumes. Here, we’ll discuss different customer support tools to help you determine which is right for your business and when you should adopt a new solution. What’s more, it’s perfectly possible—and hugely beneficial—to combine the tools as part of a holistic ecosystem. By putting them to work in tandem you can supercharge each one, and deliver the kind of customer experience many small businesses can only dream about.

When you have more than a couple of people working together to support customers, using specialized customer service software is the right choice. You can certainly deliver great customer support without using specialist software, and many online businesses start out with nothing more than a free email account. Soon though, growing companies tend to run into some limitations and rough edges.

It caters to businesses of all sizes, particularly those seeking advanced automation, scalability, and a focus on intelligent customer service. After extensive research on numerous customer service solutions, we’ve selected the best 15 customer service software for small businesses in 2024 that can help your business gain a competitive edge. According to a study by Microsoft, 95% of customers are likely to return to a business that provides excellent customer service. Gone are the days when customer service was simply a cost center, reacting to issues and complaints. All of these benefits come together to help companies offer better lead and customer experiences, ultimately boosting lead conversion rates and customer lifetime values. AI can both assist customers directly and to provide company employees with better tools and suggestions for managing and optimizing their work.

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Here are some frequently asked questions about customer service software for small businesses. With multiple options available in the market, it’s hard to come to a consensus on how to choose the best customer service software. Self-service options empower customers to find answers independently through online knowledge bases, FAQs, and online communities. Customers often prefer self-service options, if available, for basic support needs. Small businesses often have complex communication demands, especially communication-centric businesses like contact centers, making customer support solutions imperative.

In any case, the people you do recruit must be absolute stars in terms of interpersonal communication. They should be able to listen, ask questions, and make decisions quickly. Your support agents should be emphatic and understanding, always determined to resolve the customer’s issue in the best way possible. Giving preference to such small business customer service solutions skills is one of the good customer service practices, and I absolutely insist that you set up your team with interpersonal abilities in mind. Having your team members double as support agents may be the most economical solution but also the riskiest one. In a small business, everyone is already too busy to take on another job.

The answer to this question will depend on the type of business you want to start and where you’re located. Some businesses, such as restaurants, will require a special permit or license to operate. Others, such as home daycare providers, may need to register with the state. But if you’re willing to put in the work, it can be a great way to achieve your dreams and goals.

Salesforce is a global leader in CRM, with advanced, customizable functionality, user-friendly design, and outstanding reporting tools. They proudly state on their website that “98% of customers meet or exceed their ROI goals” which is quite impressive. Salesforce is a global CRM leader that offers advanced, customizable tools with a user-friendly interface and impressive reporting capabilities.

Customer service software is a dynamic set of tools businesses use to manage and streamline customer interactions. Your customer service software system intends to collect, sort, respond to, and monitor all customer queries and requests. A 24/7 team may be the best solution if you are aiming at the highest customer satisfaction but it is also the most expensive. If you wish to accommodate customers in different time zones, consider a chatbot instead. It can greet customers when your team is out of office, suggest the most popular self-service articles and offer to leave a message. This may be the most effective solution, where you can start with a small team but enhance it with a customer support software.

We found that 59% of consumers would recommend a brand to a friend because of great service. You could also earmark time in leadership meetings for someone from the support team to share what’s been going on in customer support and success. In fact, 67% of churn is avoidable if a customer’s issue is resolved in the first interaction. So just like any other aspect of your business, as you grow and have more available resources, you need to invest more into customer service and the overall customer experience.

Service and Support (10%)

Helpshift is a leader in in-app support, specifically focusing on providing in-app support for mobile applications. It allows customers to receive help when and where they need it most via both chat and self-service channels. Agents are able to manage incoming customer messages from a unified agent desktop that lets them see customer data and interaction history to aid in providing contextual support.

As a business owner, you would have to be a manager, a support rep, a developer…and I can go on and on. Laura is a freelance writer specializing in small business, ecommerce and lifestyle content. As a small business owner, she is passionate about supporting other entrepreneurs and sharing information that will help them thrive. Desk365’s CSAT surveys gather customer feedback to measure satisfaction https://chat.openai.com/ levels, helping businesses identify areas for improvement and ensure customer needs are met. Kelly Main is a Marketing Editor and Writer specializing in digital marketing, online advertising and web design and development. Before joining the team, she was a Content Producer at Fit Small Business where she served as an editor and strategist covering small business marketing content.

There are plenty of cloud CRM solutions that information technology (IT) novices can employ. You don’t have to make a large investment in physical IT infrastructure or hire IT staff to manage your CRM. Many CRM solutions are available as software as a service (SaaS), which means that you only pay for what you use and can stop using it at any time. With each one, you’ll have to compromise on features or limits to users or storage, for example. Zoho CRM, monday.com and EngageBay are Forbes Advisor’s picks for the best free CRM plans.

Nextiva is a leading provider of reliable VoIP systems for contact centers. We also offer UCaaS and customer support features so your team can handle all support needs within a single dashboard. All solutions come with Nextiva’s intuitive interface, exceptional support, and high reliability. There’s a reason RingCentral won PCMag’s Editors’ Choice in business communications. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. With HD video and cloud phone service, and solutions that keep all your customer interactions in one place, RingCentral makes it easy to work together as a team to provide good customer service.

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All of which enable you to deliver a more delightful customer experience. With eDesk, you get access to an eCommerce-focused platform that combines AI, native eCommerce integrations, automation, and metrics that help eCommerce support teams respond faster and increase sales. Intercom takes live chat to the next level by installing chat widgets on your website, mobile app, and product.

Engaging with customers where they are, social media support tools facilitate interactions on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. They manage brand reputation, address concerns publicly, and build stronger customer relationships. There are many types of CRM for different teams or needs, even though it’s traditionally used by sales teams. Instead of being developed and controlled by one company, it consists of a source code published publicly and shared by users and developers all around the world.

• Small businesses seeking to navigate the complexity of marketing tasks with limited human resources.
• Some do this by adding artificial intelligence (AI) and business intelligence, but most focus on building as many third-party software integrations as possible.
• Phone support is still a popular communication channel for customers and businesses.
• Zendesk is the complete service solution you can count on both now and in the future.
• You might also consider partnering with other businesses in your industry.

Given that almost every software offers a free trial, you can try them out and decide what works best and caters to all your business needs, including your budget. Customerly revolutionizes small business customer service with its AI-driven software, setting new standards in automated support. Leveraging advanced GPT technology, Customerly’s AI chatbots handle customer interactions end-to-end, avoiding the repetitive loops of traditional systems. The tool includes easy ticket assignment and tracking features, powerful automation, SLA management, community forums, and a knowledge base. Hiver is the world’s first multi-channel customer service software built for Google Workspace users. If you are using Gmail for customer communication, there’s no other customer service software better suited for your business.

Follow our guide for the basics of customer support software and details about the top customer service tools so you can find the right solution. LiveAgent is an omnichannel cloud-based software with the necessary tools to support your call centers. While it has standard call center tools like call routing and transfers, it also has more advanced features like unlimited call recordings and callbacks. That way, your customers can still communicate with your team even when your agents are busy or unavailable.

Respondents at the highest seniority levels, meanwhile, show larger jumps in the use of gen Al tools for work and outside of work compared with their midlevel-management peers. Looking at specific industries, respondents working in energy and materials and in professional services report the largest increase in gen AI use. However, acquiring a degree in business or a related field can provide you with the understanding and ability to run an effective company. Additionally, you may want to consider taking some business courses if you don’t have a degree to learn more about starting and running a business.