A growing number of companies are looking to provide or use software solutions that help them increase customer interaction and improve it.

This is the age of customers, and companies that fail to realize this are going under. An average consumer has more freedom to choose services and products than ever before and make their own purchase decisions.

Customers are used to having the option to contact a business, communicate with customer support staff or talk to other customers about their experiences with a certain brand. On top of that, they have the ability to voice their opinions about a business, refer their friends to a brand, or leave negative reviews online about a business and publicly call it out.

This is why customer support teams need to implement valuable tools that will provide the best service to customers, either directly or indirectly. Today we will talk about the four most important software solutions that are the bread and butter of the customer services industry.

1. Live chat software
Live chat software solutions have exploded since they first appeared. First of all, customer service agents were able to handle more customers at the same time, unlike when talking to people on phone.

This has made customer service departments a lot more productive and cost-efficient, as one employee could get more work done. It reduces the need for more human resources, while at the same time allowing an organization to cover more inquiries simultaneously.

Since live chat can be accessed very easily and it appears on the customer’s screen whenever they visit a website that has one, consumers use it very often. This means that the level of customer engagement is greatly increased. Customers like using it, as it is within their reach and they like communicating through chat.

2. Chatbot software

If you think that live chat cannot be surpassed, think again. With the development of AI technology and the appearance of AI chatbots, companies were able to take their customer service to a whole new level. Chatbots are the next big thing in customer service, as they can let companies save even more money, all while taking care of an unlimited volume of customers and being available 24/7!

Avi Ben Ezra, the owner of a free chatbot building platform called SnatchBot, has said that over 10% of the bots built through their platform are used to communicate with customers. What’s even better is the fact that their platform allows people to create free chatbots powered by AI without any coding knowledge.

Not only are chatbots available to all businesses, but they can also save those businesses a lot of money. Simply put, around 80% of customer inquiries revolve around simple questions which can be answered by a bot. The rest are more complex questions and bots can be designed to connect customers to a live chat agent so that they can talk to a human in such cases.

3. CRM software
A quality CRM solution allows a business to streamline all customer contact channels and put them together on a single platform.

There are even robust solutions that can incorporate all of the data coming from social media. Having all of this valuable information in a single place allows you to reduce confusion, mistakes, and analyze all interactions properly for the purpose of improving customer service.

A CRM allows you to create a centralized list where you can see all the currently open inquiries. This makes it easy to assign the right questions to the right employees and make sure that people who have the expertise take on the right questions they can answer properly. This makes your customer service much quicker and allows you to avoid juggling customers from one employee to another.

All of the customer feedback and requests will also be centralized within a CRM. This makes it easy to recognize problems and find ways to improve them. At the same time, you can track customer history, which can help your employees approach customers better and increase their chances of making a sale.

4. Self-service portals

A self-service portal can come in many forms and these tools are basically applications with self-service functions that companies install on their websites. They can come in the form of help desks, knowledge base systems, collaboration spaces, requests, and so on. These software solutions are designed with one thing in mind, to allow customers to help themselves and empower them.

Customers can use the software to solve their problems, find new information, or make requests. Self-service portals are very straightforward and direct, allowing those decisive people that like to do everything on their own to be themselves. Sometimes quality customer service is just about giving customers the things they need to help themselves.

In my opinion, these are the four most notable customer service tools in the industry. Still, some might work better than others, depending on your type of organization and business needs, but the ones we’ve talked about today have left a big trace in the B2C world.