11 Customer Service Platforms To Increase Retention Rates

Believe it or not, customers are an essential part of your business. Failing to provide a great customer experience means you’ll have to attract new buyers regularly to keep your business going. 

According to Huify, acquiring new customers may cost five times more than retaining an existing one. Customer service software allows you to build better relationships with buyers, so you increase your customer retention rate. 

This article will cover what customer service software is and list some of the best platforms to increase retention rates. 

What Are Customer Service Software? 

Customer service software is a program that helps companies assist customers or people looking to make a purchase. 

The software aims to provide a centralized ticketing system where customer service agents can manage, track, and resolve customer queries from all channels. It can also facilitate or inform customer service delivery by providing tracking information or other deliverables. 

This gives agents a consolidated view of the information needed to take sales orders, address billing issues, report problems, and respond to promotions. 

Role of Customer Service Software in Any Business

Customer service software consolidates and facilitates customer service. Thus, it improves the experience that buyers have with your business. 

Response time is one of the key ingredients to the customer experience.

Customer service software can store automated responses, drastically reducing queries’ response time. According to research from Hiver HQ, fast response time and consistency across channels are the two biggest drivers of a customer’s experience. 

The software can track your customer requests across all channels, ensuring you provide a timely response. Providing exceptional 24/7 service is the best way to build customer loyalty.

With customer service software, you can track various metrics to monitor your agents’ productivity and the quality of experience they deliver. This directly contributes to customer retention and the growth of your business.

Customers want to communicate with businesses using their preferred channels. Nowadays, your customer service must use a variety of channels like chatbots, email, phone, and social platforms. 

Here are the best customer service platforms that help you manage your communication in one place: 

Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk has many features and integrations to help you manage customer interactions and improve agent productivity.  

Their primary features include the following:   

• Ticket Management: Manages tickets across all channels in one place
• Self-Service: Create a knowledge base, community, and self-service platform for customers to find solutions to their problems
• Agent Productivity: Organizes tickets and adds collaboration features to close more tickets faster
• Process Automation: Create workflows and automatically assign tickets to the appropriate agent
• Extensibility: Integrate Zoho Desk with the other software your company uses

The tool is trusted by HP, LaLiga, Peta, and many more brands globally, making it a reliable customer service platform.

Helpwise

If you are looking for a complete solution for customer service management, Helpwise will assist you in managing all customer communication from a single place. 

The highlighted features of this solution include the following:

• Omnichannel Support: With Helpdesk, you can offer customer service through channels like live chat, email, SMS, Facebook, and WhatsApp from a single platform.

• Collect Customer Feedback: This platform lets you collect customer feedback using instant surveys and feedback forms to improve product and service quality.

• Integration Support: It lets you connect with CRMs, calendars, and task-management apps using native integrations. The supported apps include Outlook, Gmail, Whatsapp, ClickUp, Hubspot, Zapier, Slack, Dropbox, etc.

• All Device Compatibility: You can access Helpwise from any device. You can use its web app or download its Android or iOS app on your mobile device for easy access anytime.

Ideal for collaboration and automation, this platform enables you to transform your customer communication strategy into something more helpful.

Gladly 

Gladly is an all-in-one customer service platform that manages communication across all channels, including: 

• Phone 
• IVR
• Self-service
• Text 
• Chat 
• In-App Chat 
• Social
• Email 

With Glady, your reps can save time retrieving customer history. 

The platform features a Conversation Timeline, where you can view the buyer’s entire conversation history, no matter the channel. 

This gives more context and quicker responses and lets any agent swiftly jump in to resolve the situation. 

Gladly offers all sorts of actionable insights to help you improve your organization’s customer service. You’ll receive live dashboards and reports to uncover opportunities to support agents, identify trending topics, and review routing outcomes. 

Kustomer 

Kustomer is an omnichannel customer service software focused on managing customer interaction and proactively creating processes to improve your buyer’s experience. 

Their primary solutions include: 

• Customer Service: Their omnichannel support system empowers agents to provide faster responses and view their timeline to see every interaction from orders, appointments, reviews, and more. 
• Self-Service: Empower your customers to help themselves by building your SEO-friendly help center. Design it using their Visual Theme Builder, which doesn’t require coding. 
• Artificial Intelligence: Automate and save time by deploying custom bots to handle repetitive service requests across social, messaging, and chat applications. 
• CRM for Customer Service: The CRM system uses contextualized data and AI technology to deliver hyper-personalized support. For example, a VIP customer can be tagged as a VIP and receive special perks and treatment. 

The tool offers a 14-days free trial, and you can also schedule a demo with Kustomer to look at how the tool can help you and your business.

Richpanel 

Richpanel is a smart customer service solution that has many of the omnichannel support features as the other platforms. 

However, the software is specifically designed to help eCommerce companies and has the following features: 

• Automate More Tasks: Create custom flows to automate repetitive tickets 
• Get More Sales: Convert customer interactions into sales opportunities using product recommendations and quizzes 
• Empower Agents: Features a social-media interface that brings order management, channels, and customer profile all in one place  

When it comes to pricing, Richpanel is comparatively expensive compared to other customer service platforms and is the best fit for mid-size businesses or enterprises.

Gorgias 

Gorgias is another customer service software designed explicitly for eCommerce businesses that use Shopify, Magneto, and BigCommerce. Their goal is to optimize your support desk and turn it into a money-making machine. 

Here’s what the software has to offer:

• Centralize 1:1 Interactions: Gorgias lets you manage all channels in one place. You can create automated responses and tags to make completing tasks faster. 
• Automate Your Work: Gorgias has automation features to save time and money. For example, any refund initiated automatically sends a pre-written message with personalized tags. You can create an automated sequence for any scenario. 
• Empower Support Teams: The platform displays your customer’s history next to tickets, so they can quickly resolve issues. 
• Measure and Improve: You can see which agents have closed the most tickets, which has the most pending tickets, who have sold the most in revenue, and more. 

Gorgias is used by 10K+ DTC brands daily and is a fast-growing customer service platform.

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is the customer service tool created by Freshworks that helps service teams streamline collaboration and automation using its intuitive interface. 

It features all of the key features you’d expect in support management software, such as ticket routing, chatbots, social signals, and team dashboards. 

One of the cool perks about the software is that they offer Freshworks Academy, where you can offload the burden of training your support agents of the system.

The tool has some unique features that none of its competitors has; for example, you can look at the customers’ health and set powerful alerts that show you which customers need to be attended to first.

Tidio 

Tidio is a software that combines chatbot and live chat tools to help companies provide better customer service and generate more sales.

The program lets you integrate live chats or chatbots onto your website. They focus on answering questions live while visitors are on your site, thus increasing website conversion rates. 

Through their real-time visitor monitoring feature, your agents can see what your website visitors are looking for and reach out to them at the right moment. 

Hiver HQ

Hiver HQ is a customer service help desk designed to work with Google Workspace. Instead of using a new platform, Hiver incorporates common CS features into your business’s existing Google Office programs, including SLA, shared inboxes, and analytics.  

Artificial intelligence and automation are one of their best features, which aim to deliver personalized experiences without additional manpower. You can build voice bots with natural language understanding and automate voice conversations. 

Furthermore, Hiver offers predictive engagement, letting you engage customers at the right time and giving them the best offers or recommendations.

Front

Front is software that goes for a more personal communication style with customers. Tickets are automatically assigned to reps as they come in, giving agents complete responsibilities for more personalized service. 

Front serves various industries, including B2B technology, logistics, manufacturing, professional services, financial services, and travel. 

Additionally, you can build powerful, automated workflows to help you scale your customer support and save costs on hiring a large team of customer service employees. 

Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a full-service customer care platform that delivers all the features you’d want in a help desk system. Here are the main features that Sprinklr provides: 

• Omnichannel Communication: Supports 15+ channels and provides AI insights to reduce ticket volume 
• Routing and Workflows: Automatically assign tickets to agents and create workflows to improve efficiency 
• Build Self-Serve Tools: Build a knowledge base and chatbots for users who prefer self-seek resolutions
• Integrations: Integrates with other popular marketing, sales, and automation tools 

The platform is best suited for startups and local businesses that want to focus heavily on optimizing their customer service.

How Important is Customer Service to a Business? 

Customer service can significantly boost your company’s bottom line when executed correctly. Buyers typically are willing to pay a premium to work with brands that deliver a great experience. 

Seven out of ten consumers have said they spent 17% more to do business with a company that provides exceptional service. 

Furthermore, 73% of customers remain loyal to a company when interacting with friendly service reps, and 70% of buying decisions are based on how the customer feels they were treated.

Customer service provides plenty of benefits to a business, such as 

• Improve Customer Retention Rate: Responding to and addressing user issues can help retain customers long-term
• Increase Lifetime Value: The support team can recommend products and services to upsell and cross-sell based on their needs with data integration 
• Make Better Business Decisions: Customer service software provides metrics on how your support team performs and offers customer satisfaction scores, allowing you to implement new processes to improve their experience

Now, look at the major differences between customer service and a helpdesk.

Customer Service vs. Helpdesk 

Customer service software takes a holistic approach to serve customers, while helpdesks primarily deal with resolving technical issues. 

Helpdesks support an array of IT issues, where they are the single point of contact between the service provider and the user. It can handle glitches, connectivity issues, slow-running software, and more. 

In contrast, service desks take a more proactive approach and are process-oriented. That’s because they focus on different processes to keep customers happy. 

Some of the common service desks activities are 

• Knowledge Management: Create helpful resources for users 
• Self-Service: Empower users to resolve their problems 
• Service Management: Answer customer questions and resolve issues across all departments 
• Reporting: Notify any important changes or events 

Here are the primary difference between customer service and a helpdesk platform:

How is Customer Service Helping Businesses Increase Sales? 

Supporting your existing customers is an effective way for businesses to increase their sales. 

Beyond retention and improving their lifetime value, customer service can also help to generate referrals. 

Customers who enjoy their experience with a brand may become advocates willing to refer your company to their friends, family, and colleagues. 

Here are practical tips for encouraging customer advocacy: 

• Always respond quickly and support customers across all channels. 40% of customers worldwide still prefer the phone as their primary customer service channel. 
• Reps should go the extra mile when solving customer issues; this leads to a memorable and positive customer experience. Here, a few things to do is wish customers on their birthday, write a thank you message, etc.
• Build active customer communities to encourage customers to interact with others about their experience or how to use your product or service in their business. 

The points mentioned above assist customer services in helping businesses increase their sales.

Wrapping Up

Finding the right customer service software is an integral part of your support’s team ability to deliver an outstanding experience and grow your business. 

Customer service doesn’t have to be an unorganized mess. The right software lets you efficiently manage communication across channels, personalize your response to customers, and integrates with customer data. 

This article will help deliver timely and positive customer experiences that increase sales and retention. 

Next, you can check out the sales pipeline software.