As long as you have the will, you will be successful at winning and retaining your customers. After all, anyone doing business in the eCommerce world nowadays always strive for the better – better product, better marketing strategies, better customer experience on their website and better customer care. This effort from business owners leads to the fact that customers are “spoiled”, become more demanding and expect highly from the shop they’re going to buy from.
To help your eCommerce business overcome the difficulties on the way to a rocking customer service that carves deeply in customer’s heart, here are the best customer service tools around for any startup who wants to make their customer service remarkable without having to hire more support agents or spend thousands on an expensive system.
1. Live chat service
Subiz
Subiz is a smart live chat service for any business size who wants to take over the live chat support smoothly on their website.
Start with only $9.59 per agent each month, you can enjoy a simple yet extra-flexible and effective live chat system with many powerful features in comparison with other big live chat guys out there. Subiz live chat brings you ultimate chat automation, chat personalization for agents, performance report and more.
You can view more Subiz features here or sign up for 30-day risk-free trial to love Subiz.
Olark
Another popular name in the list of live chat sofwares is Olark live chat. Like Zopim, Olark provides you a well-done analytics of current visitors on your website and filter who are your prioritized visitors based on specific rules. The strong point of this platform for me is its integration with CRM like Salesforce and others.
Olark price starts from $15 each month for just one chat operator. Another point to mention is that while Zopim can’t let you do much with its design, Olark is one-step behind in comparison with the thoughtful dashboard from Zopim.
Check out Olark’s features here.
2. Email support
Gmail for business
If your business is just up and you need a totally free email application for your company, then Gmail app for business is a good choice. There is no need to question the quality of email service by Google, isn’t it?
The Gmail app for business is slick and fully featured. We’re all so familiar with using Gmail for personal purpose and the business level has no difference. Plus, you can always sync Gmail with other platforms like Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.
Zoho Mail
Like how Zoho mail calls itself, this kick-ass email service lets you take control of your inbox without any hassle.
Unlike Gmail who lets ads display somewhere when you’re browsing emails, Zoho mail is totally ad-free. Zoho mail is born for business with clean look and feel combined with powerful mail features. Learn more about Zoho mail’s features here.
Zoho does offer free plan with 5GB storage per user for maximum 10 users. Paid subscription starts from $2.5 user/month with 10GB storage.
3. Social media support
Sprout Social
Managing customer service via social channels is just as important as via your main site. So don’t neglect choosing a good social media management platform for your company.
Choosing Sprout Social is a wise choice. Sprout Social interface is very easy to navigate, smooth in publishing, managing and scheduling posts on different social platforms. Find more features of Sprout Social here.
Price is pretty high, from $50 per user each month.
Hootsuite
Although Hootsuite is standing below Sprout Social in terms of displaying interface and analytics, if you are seeking for a cheaper and acceptable quality of social management for your team, then Hootsuite is a good choice. I’m personally using Hootsuite and I find no trouble with it except for the quite “complex” tabs of different social channels.
Price starts from only $8.99 per month. Of course free account is available.
4. Ticket support
Kayako
Kayako is a configurable helpdesk for your business with live chat, ticket system and a dashboard for your support agents where they can set up general knowledge base for popular questions, etc.
The tool has a quite comprehensive combination of different support channels which helps your customer service management be put in the realm of your hands easily.
Free trial is available. Paid plan starts from $24 per month for each agent.
If putting Kayako and Zendesk on a scale then Zendesk in some aspects is the winner. First the price for starter is much lower than Kayako’s. Zendesk itself is a SaaS, it supports your customer service management on many scales, from social to forum, live chat, etc. Furthermore, Zendesk supports WordPress and integrates with many other systems.
However, if you consider more functions for a purely helpdesk software, then Kayako is still worth your choice too.
5. Phone support
Grasshopper
Grasshopper is a virtue phone system you can count on if you need more power with customer service via phone. This service helps you make and receive calls from personal cell phone or via Skype call.
You can customize auto answers with many other extensions supported in Grasshopper, receive voicemail transcripts for later use and many other features. The starting price to pay is $12 per month.
Twilio
Twilio is a cloud communication service. Twilio helps you make and receive phone calls as well as send and receive text messages using its web service APIs. It’s a very huge and powerful system. The price varies, depends on which products you want to use and where you are located.
Check out Twilio’s features here.
6. Customer Service Management (CRM) system
Salesforce
Salesforce is one big name in the CRM systems out there. Perhaps it’s the most popular. Salesforce offers you a broad suite of CRM applications for any business size, with the target at sales and support.
For small business, this system allows you to manage an unlimited number of contacts, track sales and deals closely, take control of tasks and events, collect web leads as well as track performance with reporting.
Price range is based on the service you want to use. If you want to advance your customer service to another level, then CRM system like Salesforce can’t be skipped out.
Insightly
As in its introduction, Insightly is one easy, powerful and affordable online CRM system trusted by over 400,000 small businesses worldwide.
Built for small team, Insightly is easy to use, supports multi-channels and is the only one solution that offers 2 free accounts with no limit.
Nimble
Wanna make your customer service super star on social channels too? Or your business does great customer service task via social media? Nimble is a perfect solution for you since it’s a CRM for social channels.
The price is also very reasonable with $15 per month.
Which ones are gonna be your heroes?
Above are just the nominees of the best customer service tools you might choose to run with your customer service. Which ones are you going to pick up? I must say that applying all these tools at once are not the best solution for your company, so consider ones that are suitable with your support policy as well as your budget.
Already had experience with some of those best customer service tools mentioned here? Why not let us know what you think about them? Don’t hesitate to bookmark this article or share it around if you find it useful for you!
