Buyers Guide

Table of Contents

• 1. What is Customer Service Software?
• 2. The benefits of Customer Service Software
• 3. Typical features of Customer Service Software
• 4. The cost of Customer Service Software
• 5. Considerations when purchasing customer service software
• 6. Relevant Customer Service Software trends

1. What is Customer Service Software?

Customer Service Software is a ticketing system that documents, tracks, and resolves customer queries. It collates customer requests from multiple channels (phone, email, live chat, and social media) into a single portal so that agents can quickly and easily address queries.

The software allows multiple agents to work on each ticket, making it easier for different departments to collaborate on meeting customer needs. The tool also provides detailed reports and insights into customer interactions, helping organizations assess the quality of their customer service.

2. The benefits of Customer Service Software

Customer service software supports businesses in managing and maintaining a relationship with customers. The solution can help you realize the following benefits:

• Collect customer queries across multiple channels: Customer service software collates customer queries from multiple platforms into a single stream. Whether it’s a call to the helpline, an email to the support team, or a comment on your social media page, the tool generates a ticket for each customer query. These tickets get automatically added to the centralized stream, ensuring that no query is unaddressed.
• Reduce time that agents spend on each ticket: Agents can tag members of other teams or forward tickets to the right team, directing the customer to the best resource. Standardized answers, easily editable templates, and the ability to simultaneously respond to multiple queries shortens ticket resolution time.
• Increase customer satisfaction with faster issue resolution: The software lets users prioritize tickets. It also organizes the ticket resolution workflow and allows agents to collaborate on tickets. This shortens the resolution cycle and improves customer satisfaction levels.
• Get insights into team performance: Customer service software offers analytical capabilities, with customizable reports and dashboards, which provide insights into the performance of your support team. Find out the time your team takes to respond, how busy agents are on certain days of the week, and which questions are frequently asked. This information can help you manage agents, improve their response time, and increase productivity.

3. Typical features of Customer Service Software

• Knowledge base: Build and manage a centralized, searchable repository of information regarding frequent and previously asked queries and responses.
• Support ticketing: Track interactions and autogenerate tickets for customer queries and service requests.
• Multichannel communication: Manage incoming and outgoing customer communication on multiple channels, including email, phone, live chat, and social media.
• Queue management: Manage the ticket queue and monitor the wait time for incoming requests that haven’t been routed.
• Live chat: Chat with customers to resolve their queries in real time.
• Appointment management: Schedule and manage interactions with customers.

4. The cost of Customer Service Software

Most products in the market are priced on a “per user, per month” basis, and can be divided into the following three pricing tiers based on their starting price:

Price ranges*:

• $4 - $9
• $9 - $22
• $22+

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offering that was found on vendor websites on May 20, 2019. These ranges correspond to the 25th, 75th, and 100th percentile of the pricing information gathered from vendor websites of sample products.

The above list summarizes pricing for the base plans of most products. An enterprise, or premium product, which is priced higher, may include some additional features such as a higher number of users, increased storage space, cross-team collaboration, and enhanced reporting and dashboards.

5. Considerations when purchasing Customer Service Software

• The solution’s usability: A poor user experience (UX) is bad for business. The tool shouldn’t slow down agents and lengthen the response time. Therefore, before you purchase a solution, try it out and ensure that the UI/UX is not too complicated or messy for your agents. Many software vendors offer free trial periods for the product.
• Integration with existing third-party apps: Check whether your preferred solution and/or pricing plan supports integration with other solutions you use.

6. Relevant Customer Service Software trends

• Chatbots to improve customer self-service: Vendors are using chatbots to resolve customer queries in real time without a ticket. The technology can simulate interactions like a human and resolve simple queries about operating hours, contact info, and status updates. It can also recommend entries in the knowledge base—such as if a customer doesn’t know how to reset their password, the chatbot will direct them to a step-by-step description of the process. Businesses that use chatbots reported a 70% reduction in call, chat, and/or email queries.
• AI to increase the efficiency of agents: Customer service software providers are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to help agents work smarter. Some are using it to automatically tag, categorize, and index tickets for easy reference, while others are using AI to determine customer distress levels and predict chat answers. AI can also recommend changes to existing articles based on how customers communicate their issues, making answers easier to find and understand in the future.