The importance of providing excellent customer service is really difficult to overstate these days. If a customer has a negative experience with a business’s customer service, e.g. their request gets no answer, chances are they will never return.

Despite that, many businesses aren’t doing a good job at making sure that the experience they provide to their customers is great.

Here’s some proof.

• Only 46 percent of customers say that their customer service request has been resolved within an hour
• 10 percent of customers report that their requests were never resolved
• 27 percent of customers say they’ve switched businesses because they were regularly kept on hold by customer service for too long
• 30 percent of customers report leaving a business after being passed around to multiple agents
• 51 percent of customer say they would never use a company again after a negative experience with customer service
• 48 percent would share their negative experience with others on social media or post a negative review of that business.

Since your customer support team’s success – and your business’s success – depends on their ability to satisfy ever-evolving customer requests and collect information from them for service improvement purposes, making sure they’re provided with everything they need to achieve this goal is a must.

There are multiple types of customer support software currently available for businesses that allow them to collect customer satisfaction information and answer their requests. Some of the most popular and effective ones include such software as help desk, ticketing systems, or omnichannel contact centers.

Let’s review their advantages below and determine the option that suits the needs of your business.

Help Desk Software

The first option is very popular among businesses today because it allows to resolve customer requests efficiently by automating this process with ticket management. The automation eliminates the need for a manual analysis of customer requests and increases the number of requests you can answer.

Moreover, modern help desk software is social and enables customers to reach you via such channels as social media, email, and phone. This is tremendously important for businesses because many customers may prefer these channels for communicating with businesses.

Advantages of Help Desk Software

There are several reasons why you should consider help desk software for your business.

• Increased Productivity of Customer Support Team

It’s a known fact that creating tickets for every customer’s requests makes up a lot of customer support members’ time. With help desk software, they don’t need to do that because ticket creation is automatic, so they can focus on more important things such as working on resolving customers’ problems.

Another important feature of help desk that contributes to increasing the productivity of a customer support team is a unified agent interface. It enables to have a single view of all customer details such as personal data and previous support requests, which improves efficiency as well.

• Faster Request Resolution

Automation of ticket creation and other time-consuming tasks allows faster ticket resolution, which is exactly what customers want.

Moreover, your support team would be able to send updates on the status of requests (this is a feature present in many modern help desk suites).

As it was mentioned above, help desk also makes it possible to accept customers’ requests via social media, phones, and email. Multi-channel customer support is also critical to meet customers’ contact preferences.

• Creation of Customer Information Library

Having a knowledge base is a huge advantage because it allows to collect and store information about customer requests for analysis and evaluation.

Best Help Desk Software for Online Businesses

• LiveAgent. Number one rated help desk software in 2018.
• Vision Helpdesk. Popular centralized software that collects all customer support requests from a number of channels such as social media, email, web contact forms, and phone.
• SysAid. Help desk, service desk, and ITSM solution.

Omnichannel Contact Center

This option is getting increasingly popular because it unites every customer service channel a company can use to interact with customers, including social media, voice, email, web forms, and others.

Since it’s up to customers to decide the most convenient channel to communicate with a business, having an omnichannel engagement strategy is a good idea to increase customer satisfaction and, of course, their loyalty.

In this context, Workforce Management (WFM) technology can perfectly accommodate business needs towards driving customer satisfaction by successfully enabling companies to manage their customer service function. WFM ensures that businesses always have the right people with the right skills at the right time to handle customer service requests in an omnichannel environment in the best possible way. Workforce Management technology essentially has a strong return on investment (ROI) that companies can and should leverage to increase operational efficiency, reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction. injixo WFM, for instance, is an award-winning workforce management cloud platform which especially helps contact centers to manage and automate the entire planning process from start to finish while empowering employees to provide outstanding customer service.

Advantages of Omnichannel Contact Center

• Increased Customer Satisfaction

Customers have specific preferences about the channels they use to interact with customers, and an omnichannel contact center allows to meet this need. Since they are also getting increasingly impatient and want to get answers to their questions right away, implementing this center would simplify communication with your business.

• Maximized Performance of Customer Support

In an omnichannel contact center, the operations occur through a single platform, so the support team can move easily across communication channels and even multi-task if required.

• Advanced Analytics

Having an omnichannel center means that a business can create a knowledge base of customer-related information and data with a single point access. This base would be a great source of valuable information for customer analytics and customer support analytics.

• More Cross-Sell Opportunities

The results of the analysis of each customer’s historical data allow your support team to provide better advice and recommendations. By knowing what products or services the customers can be interested in, the team may make meaningful suggestions without being pushy.

The Verdict

While both options offer omnichannel customer support, the ultimate choice will depend on the capabilities of the suite which is affordable for your business. For example, help desk software is perfect for technical support and customer service for small businesses but large companies use it for more organized and efficient customer support.

Many omnichannel contact center software, on the other hand, is more focused on customer-related services than on technical support. So, if you’re running an IT company, help desk could be a better choice but an omnichannel contact center works great for other industries.

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