4 Top Tools to Help You Deliver Amazing Customer Service

Customer service has undoubtedly grown in importance over the past few years, as consumers’ expectations from brands have evolved as well.

Not only that, but people are expecting brands to respond to customer service issues on numerous platforms – your website, your social channels, via email, phone, etc. – and they expect them to do it as swiftly as possible.

So how does the modern business raise to these challenges?

The answer is simple: you need to leverage the right tools to help. With a few key tools to help you along the way, you’ll be able to deliver better customer service, faster – and impress your customers in the process.

In this blog post, discover 4 top tools to help you deliver amazing customer service across channels:

Zendesk: for easy self-service

Zendesk are some of the biggest names in customer service, with numerous different types of tools for pretty much any customer service need.

However, the tool I want to focus on here is Zendesk Guides – a self-service database of knowledge about your product or service that helps you empower both your customers and your customer service agents.

Basically, it’s a way to make it easier for your customers to find the information they need about your product/service, without having to call, email or text anyone from your team.

This makes things easier both for your customer and for your agents: the customer can find the information they need with the speed of a regular Google search and your agents will have more time to focus on those complex customer service issues.

So how exactly does Zendesk Guides work?

Using a WYSIWYFG editor (and a Google Docs importer) you can easily build a knowledge base where you include as much information as you can about your product/service, as well as a list of frequently asked questions (for example, how does one return a product, how long delivery takes and so on).

Once your knowledge base goes live, people will easily be able to look up relevant articles using the built-in search bar; plus, you also have access to analytics to help you understand what articles you need to change and/or what you need to add to the library.

Your agents will also be able to leverage all this content as well; whenever they get a customer service issue, they get direct people to the appropriate article where they can find the answers and instructions they need.

NapoleonCat: for social media customer service

NapoleonCat is an all-in-one social media marketing tool that puts a big focus on customer service: its objective is to help you save time not only when it comes to managing your social media and posting updates, but also when it comes to managing any questions or other customer service issues from your customers or prospects.

Basically, it helps pull together all of your social media messages and comments in a single, unified inbox so that you can see them and respond them, all in the same place, whether they’re from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or even Google My Business.

You can then respond to any queries or comments on any platform, directly from the inbox, as well as assign certain comments to other people on your team.

But what truly makes things a lot easier for teams is that you can set up all kinds of automation rules to help you save even more time; for example, you can:

• Automatically delete or hide any spammy comments or any other messages that you don’t need to respond to
• Set up auto-reply to easily respond to common questions – all done automatically, of course
• Automatically assign tickets to others on your team and tag updates

And, apart from social media customer service features, you also get other vital social media management features such as scheduling updates and detailed analytics and reporting, so you can pretty much use the same tool for all of your social media marketing needs.

Olark: for live chat

No matter how amazing your website is, your visitors and customers will still have questions; maybe they can’t find what they need directly on your website or maybe they simply want to talk to someone directly to ask their questions, rather than have to search through their website.

And that’s where live chat comes in – an easy, quick way for your website visitors and customers to ask questions and solve any issues they might have.

Olark is one of the top solutions in the live chat space, for several reasons:

• You can fully customize your live chat window to suit your branding: add your brand colours and your logo and use avatars with your agents’ headshots to make the experience as “human” as possible
• Set up automation rules to trigger conversations at the right time, based on your visitors’ behaviour on your website – an easy way to boost conversions from your website

• Create transcripts of your conversations and easily filter through your transcripts to find what you need
• Detailed live chat reports that are updated in real time to help you monitor chat volume and overall customer satisfaction

Nicereply: for tracking customer satisfaction

In order to offer amazing customer service to all of your customers, you need to understand how you’re performing. Your analytics can tell you a lot – but they can only tell you so much.

They can tell you how efficient you are and how many customer service issues you’ve solved – but they can’t tell you what your customers actually thought of your service.

That’s why you need a tool like Nicereply; it leverages surveys to show your customers that you value them and their opinions and to help you understand how satisfied your customers really are with your product or service, as well as how you handled their customer service issues.

Nicereply have several different types of fully customizable surveys:

• Customer satisfaction surveys; for example, asking your customers how happy they were with the way the agent handled their query
• Customer effort scores, to help you understand what makes your customers feel frustrated
• Net Promoter Score, to see how likely it is for your customers to recommend your product or service to someone else

On top of all that, you also have access to highly robust analytics. With their help, you’ll be able to check, at a glance, how satisfied your customers are and what you need to improve, as well as predict future trends based on existing data.

What’s more, you can also analyse he performance of your various customer service teams and find out which agents perform best.

Conclusion

A great product or service isn’t enough to build a truly successful and scalable business – it’s only the first step. Beyond your product, you also need to deliver a great experience to all of your leads, prospects and customers.

And what’s more, you need to keep your existing customers happy; after all, it’s no secret that it’s much more expensive to get new customers then to keep existing ones. And the best way to keep your existing customers happy?

Offer them amazing customer service: be where they are, be quick and be friendly and not only will you have happier customers, but it will also help you get more new customers in the long run.

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