Your products are better; your prices are affordable; and your marketing strategies are top-notch. Then why are your customers not returning?
What is it about your competitor that attracts most customers despite you having ensured that you outdo them on all fronts?
All fronts? Are you sure?
Well, answer these questions:
Chances are, despite excelling at all components of your business, you are still falling short in the customer support segment.
The earliest you realize the importance of optimum customer service, the better. Even if you are a small business and don’t have the resources to set up a whole unit, you can’t leave customer support on the loose end without risking the growth of your business.
Customers expect real-time support from the first time they interact with your brand until they make a final purchase. However, if you fail to offer and provide support at any of these stages, you will most probably lose that customer (forever).
The only way to earn customer loyalty and retain maximum customers is by providing a 360-degree omnichannel customer experience. And we are here to help!
Customer service today is not limited to calls, emails, and chats. In fact, 76% of customers confirmed that they prefer different support channels depending on context. Brands have to create a unified experience for their customers by integrating all mediums their target audience uses.
This platform puts CX at the core and aspires to accelerate customer query acknowledgment and resolution. That means, your teams should be able to pick up the conversation from previous sessions even when they interact via different channels during the course of their buying journey.
Omnichannel customer service platforms are designed to help brands streamline their customer service operations despite the size of the team.
Such customer service software unifies various channels to help businesses manage customer communications effectively. With a robust platform, you can organize incoming queries via live chats, social media platforms, messages, emails, phones, customer service portals, etc, manage responses, and track resolutions in real-time.
An omnichannel support platform helps you ensure convenience and exceptional customer experience for your potential and existing customers, allowing you to level up your customer support front despite having a small-size team.
Now that you precisely know how a customer service tool can help you deliver a competitive customer experience, we are taking you to a thorough analysis of the top 10 omnichannel customer service software.
As you read, make sure you list down features you think are useful for your business and the names of software that offer them. And hey, don’t miss out on the list of criteria you should keep in mind for selecting the best platform for your business, towards the end of this article.
For improving customer experience, you need to invest in an all-in-one tool that equips your team with features, like a shared inbox, intuitive response suggestions, automation, and extensive reports and customer behavior insights. If you are looking for such a power-packed solution, Helpwise is the best and most affordable tool in the market for small and medium-sized businesses.
Helpwise is a simplified omnichannel customer support software that allows your teams to deliver hyper-personalized, low-effort yet high-impact resolutions to your customers. It directs all incoming customer queries to a centralized inbox where the automated system assigns them to respective agents, suggests contextual replies, and tags conversations.
The tool also improves context so that you can streamline conversation with a customer regardless of the incoming medium and offer a better customer experience. Its collision detection feature further ensures that no two agents are working on the same query.
Additionally, the platform is has strong automation and customizable workflows that save your agents’ time from mundane tasks, such as sorting queries and tracking previous conversations, allowing them to focus on more important tasks and improve their productivity.
Since the majority of similar tools available in the market are either too complex or too expensive or both, Helpwise resolves to be one of the most viable and robust customer service tools for small and medium-scale businesses. Besides, its powerful integration and extensive customization capabilities make this tool superior to its counterparts.
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Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service software designed to help you manage customer inquiries across various channels from a single platform. It equips your team with intuitive responses and personalized support to solve customer issues better.
Freshdesk also hosts an AI-powered chatbot to ensure your customer queries are acknowledged on time and a thank you detector to prevent the re-opening of tickets that are resolved.
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83% of customers in a survey agreed that they feel more loyal to brands that address and resolve their complaints. This shows how essential it is to quickly acknowledge and settle customer issues. Help Scout’s intuitive and sophisticated omnichannel customer service software allows agents to build empathetic connections with customers in no time.
Its inbox-like interface collects all queries in one view and accommodates each customer’s information and previous interactions in one thread.
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Livegent’s help desk software is an omnichannel customer service software for businesses of all sizes. This software keeps all incoming communications in one place and transforms them into tickets for effective management of customer queries.
This platform also comes with an in-built call center, which allows you to offer one-on-one resolutions via phone calls. Additional call-center features like call recording, call forwarding, and IVR enhances its functionality even more.
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Zoho Desk takes empathy-embedded support to the next level with its sentiment analysis feature. Zoho has made the Desk omnichannel for customer service to allow your team to serve your customers better. The tool aims to improve your agent’s productivity through contextual support, ticket management, and AI.
Happiness ratings further determine how satisfied and happy your customers are with your services so that you can track, improve, and optimize the customer support experience.
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Groove is one affordable shared email alternative for small businesses with small teams. The software doesn’t need the expertise to work on it. Your team can easily manage customer communications through a centralized inbox. Besides, the comprehensive knowledge base is supposed to answer customer queries and reduce incoming inquiries that need live support.
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Intercom totally takes the AI-enabled customer service game up a notch. For small businesses with a lean team, the tool makes it easy to enhance customer satisfaction through its AI-powered tools.
It has also aced a simple and effective AI-powered shared inbox to accelerate response and resolution rates on customer concerns to deliver a great omnichannel customer experience.
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Hiver is one simplest omnichannel support tool for businesses that look for a no-brainer tool. You can keep using your Gmail and live chat for customer service sans all the customer query management issues.
Hiver is built for Google workspace where it utilizes Google’s tools to enhance your workflows. You can delegate emails to support teams, collaborate internally through shared drafts, and set up rules to automate ticketing.
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An organized process is the heart of a successful omnichannel customer service system. Zendesk makes it possible to achieve process excellence and keep your business in sync. This flexible omnichannel call center software can be customized as per your existing business environment and scaled as you grow.
You can connect all your data sources to the platform so that when a customer contacts, the representative has all the relevant information on display. It is also comprehensive in terms of accommodating multiple communication channels, such as voice, email, SMS, live chat, social media, mobile phones, web pages, and other messaging apps.
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Gorgias takes the hybrid road to offer the best of both customer service and sales under one umbrella. This omnichannel support tool is built for e-commerce businesses.
It allows your service team to build on the sales agent’s efforts and understand customer concerns before responding. Similarly, the sales team can benefit from the support team’s data to ensure they are personalizing sales calls and not making redundant contacts.
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Every business is different and so are its needs and goals. Consider your business requirements before investing in a comprehensive customer service solution. Because the more features you have, the more you pay. So, look for features specific to your business and choose a platform accordingly.
Investing in omnichannel support software is only worth it if you can cater to your customers on all mediums they are using to connect with you. Hence, first, you must have a clear list of communication channels you want to be unified in one place. And second, you must ensure the platform you are prospecting supports and integrates all of them.
Some essential features of a robust omnichannel customer service software are:
Look for all the essential and additional features according to your business before finalizing the customer service software.
Pricing is a crucial factor that you must include in your checklist. For a small business, the cost of the software should justify the features you are getting. Besides, you should also consider how it will add up in the future as you increase the number of agents and features. Consider both upfront and long-term cost and see if it fits your budget before making a final decision.
Needless to say that you need to keep the future possibilities in sight while choosing the best omnichannel customer service software for your small business. As your business grows, you will need to expand your team and add on some more features to increase the team’s efficiency. Besides, the software should also be able to handle the increasing volume of customer inquiries as your business stretches. A tool with no scaling capabilities will not serve the purpose.
Nobody should have to spend additional time and money on training the team members to use an omnichannel customer service software. Look for a tool that is easy to set up and use, has intuitive navigation, and gets easily incorporated into your existing system.
Similar to how you prioritize customer support for a great customer experience, your vendor should do the same for you (their customer). Stay away from brands that don’t offer client support and service or have a poor reputation in this domain.
Satisfactory omnichannel customer experience is paramount for the success of your small business. We have enough data and real-life evidence to confidently say that a happy customer will retain and come back to your brand. They will even recommend your products/services to more people. But one poor experience can break loyalty and damage your reputation in no time, especially since social media has the power to influence customers’ buying decisions on a large scale.
Hence, selecting and investing in good omnichannel customer service software will help you create remarkable experiences for your customers on all platforms and build your brand loyalty like nothing else.
Helpwise allows you to embed empathy with apt resolutions and create remarkable customer experience. Book your demo today! Or try the tool for free here.
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