15 Best Customer Service Software for Small Businesses in 2024

For this reason, remember to focus on your business journey and don’t measure your success against someone else’s. Your blood pressure climbs as you face an obstacle course worthy of “American Ninja Warrior” to get help. Find a variety of financing options including SBA loans, https://chat.openai.com/ commercial financing and a business line of credit to invest in the future of your business. Merchant services are provided by WePay, Inc., a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase Bank, N. A. Merchant services are provided by WePay, Inc., a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A.

As your business grows, you can add more of both, enabling your CRM to scale along with your plans. Once you’ve procured and converted leads, it’s vital that you put in the work to retain them as customers and promote customer loyalty. The CRM will provide sentiment analysis, automated ticketing, customer support automation and user behavior tracking to help you determine problems and quickly address them with your customers.

For example, you can configure its support bot (named Freddy) to assist your customers by answering FAQs via chat and email. Need to automate escalations and other tasks using specific event-based triggers? This integration allows you to synchronize your customer data between both platforms, enhancing the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and customer support. When selecting customer service software for your business, there are several key considerations to keep in mind. Packages with discounted pricing for an unlimited number of agents are also available. One of the most important developments in CRM for SMBs and entrepreneurs is the availability of easy yet effective mobile apps.

She is a former Google Tech Entrepreneur and she holds an MSc in International Marketing from Edinburgh Napier University. Katherine Haan is a small business owner with nearly two decades of experience helping other business owners increase their incomes. It is now easier than ever to adopt CRM technology into the everyday operation of your company. CRM companies will continue to focus on making CRMs less expensive, easier to use and easier to implement. Companies that have been hesitant about integrating CRM technology into their business will be encouraged to give it a try. Once your search is narrowed down to a handful of options, start researching those options.

Zendesk Support: Best for Easy Ticket Management

Customer service software with reporting and analytics tools and customer feedback mechanisms can provide valuable insights for decision-makers. With real-time reporting dashboards and omnichannel analytics, management teams gain visibility into ticket queues, team bandwidth, and performance. Customer tracking Chat GPT software and reporting tools let you measure and analyze customer history, behavior, and customer service metrics. This data is essential because it tracks how many requests you receive, how many tickets are open, when agents manage those tickets, and how satisfied the customer is with the experience.

This integration allows for a more unified approach to customer management and a comprehensive view of customer interactions. Customer service software is a specialized tool designed to assist businesses in managing, organizing, and responding to customer interactions and inquiries. This software serves as a centralized platform where customer communications from various channels, such as email, social media, phone calls, and live chat, are aggregated and tracked. Help Scout has fully adapted to customer preferences of seeking support via email, live chat, and social media channels. We like the centralized conversational inbox for teams to collaborate and stay on top of customer issues in real time.

You can visit its support page for the full list of languages Freshdesk supports. For a list of Freshdesk’s supported languages, visit its Help Center page. Insights on business strategy and culture, right to your inbox.Part of the business.com network.

What makes an open-source CRM beneficial is that anyone with the know-how can “open up” the software themselves and change features, interface elements and virtually anything else as they see fit. With the recent updates to ChatGPT, most customer support platforms have started to offer AI features built into their products. Once upon a time, Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), and other social media platforms were simply digital homes to post pictures of food you’d eaten and to argue with strangers about politics. Though those are still primary uses of the platforms, more people are trying to resolve their issues via social customer service. Sprout Social integrates with all of the major social media networks including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Pinterest, and TikTok.

Commerce teams can quickly launch and scale ecommerce — from online orders to curbside pickup — for their consumer shoppers (B2C commerce) and business buyers (B2B commerce). And customer service agents can respond to customer needs on any channel — from the office, at home, or in the field. No matter your industry, or even if you’re a non-profit, if you communicate with customers — and your employees rely on information about those customers — CRM tools can help.

In addition, its free version is limited to only two users and has fewer features, which could make it less appealing to very small businesses. It also requires a business email, along with a phone number to sign up, but it does not require a credit card. We did find the sales number in multiple places, but not any support number or email, giving us pause on any potential difficulty for direct communication should the need arise. Furthermore, there is a help area of the website with self-help content via a searchable database.

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Customer service offers the opportunity to establish a direct relationship with the customer, which can be nurtured over time to create awareness and loyalty. There’s nothing worse than trying to work with a customer service representative who doesn’t understand your issue. A company’s team absolutely must know what they are talking about when it comes to services, products and policies.

This type of communication is great for sending service announcements or payment reminders out to customers, reaching employees to fill open shifts, or gathering feedback through surveys. Over the last few years, there’s been an increased focus on self-service options. It’s very cost-effective, and self-service tools are the preferred support choice for many — up to 67% of users, in fact. By now, you know that your choice of customer service software can make or break your company. Choosing the right software, and learning how to integrate it into your business’s customer service strategy, can make all the difference in your organization’s growth and success. The software should also be flexible enough to be used across various teams (sales, marketing, and customer support, for instance).

Teams can collaborate, switch between channels, and leverage smart workflow automations to get the job done seamlessly. Add messaging to your website or mobile app so customers can reach you instantly on any device. Stay in touch with personalized interactions, and allow any agent to pick up the conversation without losing context. Zendesk works right out of the box, so you can get up and running quickly and onboard agents in record time with our easy-to-use interface.

Users can automate follow-up responses based on survey results to gather more insights on the topic. Key performance metrics—like rep productivity, response time, and support volume—are available with the reporting and analytics dashboard. AI Summarize helps users condense email threads into bullet points, while AI Assist suggests generated text while agents are typing out replies. AI Assist can also improve the content, change the tone, and translate it into other languages.

Another thing CRM software does best is providing a centralized database with all information on your customers, making it easily accessible to anyone in your company who needs it. This makes it easy for a sales representative to see what products a certain customer is interested in, for example. If the customer has previously interacted with the company, the CRM will include records of that interaction, which can inform future marketing efforts and sales pitches. This saves your employees the time of digging through old files and records, and it makes for a better and more productive experience for the customer.

Intercom’s product tours feature allows businesses to create interactive, step-by-step guides for their products or services, enhancing customer engagement and user experience. HubSpot, a leader in the field of inbound marketing, has also significantly impacted customer service with their Service Hub. It offers tools for managing customer communications, ticketing, feedback, and knowledge base creation, all aimed at improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. HappyFox is a customer service solution and help desk management software provider. It features a ticketing system that helps teams organize requests and features a single customer view for omnichannel support. With automation, customizable workflows, and AI-powered chatbots, HappyFox helps automate everyday tasks.

As of May 2023, the Starter CRM Suite starts at $30/mo if you pay annually. This gives you basic access to 1 shared inbox, 5,000 email templates, calling SDK, mobile inbox, conversation routing, and several other features. Customers don’t have to go to your website, search for answers or call your company. Helpshift makes sending responses as easy as texting, thus giving customers a better experience. Customers can send screenshots and rich media files to show you their problems. Other features include push notifications, analytics and the ability to customize colors, fonts and other branding elements.

It allows for asynchronous communication, so customers can reach out at their convenience, even when the business is closed. Support agents are given time to research customer issues and address them thoroughly. We’ve done the hard work on your behalf, narrowing it down to six of the very best options—two communication software tools, two help desk software tools, and two live chat software tools. Like an instant messaging app, live chat software lets you interact directly with customers in real time. This usually happens through a set of predefined rules set up in the software application.

Intercom’s basic Starter Package starts at $74 (USD) per month, which includes Intercom Messenger, shared inbox, conversation routing, saved replies, and behavioral analytics. Zoho Desk’s strength lies in its ability to centralize customer support activities, thus promoting efficiency and a seamless customer service experience. With its robust ticketing system, Zoho Desk ensures that every customer query small business customer service solutions is appropriately tracked and addressed, improving customer satisfaction rates. Freshdesk holds its position among the industry’s best due to its comprehensive feature set, user-friendly interface, and commitment to customer satisfaction. One of Freshdesk’s standout qualities is its streamlined ticketing system, which organizes customer inquiries from various channels into a single, manageable interface.

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It’s a complete help desk platform making it possible to build customer loyalty and trust while staying personal. Help Scout is among those customer service tools for a small business that can boast about practicality. However, live chat, knowledge base, and a range of integrations are also available. Explore the interface, test features, and play with reporting dashboards.

Accept debit and credit cards with safe, secure, and convenient Payment Solutions from Chase anywhere you do business – online, in-store, and on-the-go. Visit our Developer Center to find Payments APIs, developer tools, and documentation. “Whether it’s for personal or business, we trust Chase for all our financial needs. Our banker is interested in our business and provides us the guidance and products we need to grow our business.” Whatever your business size or industry, we offer checking solutions that are built to meet your needs, support your visions, and keep you moving forward.

“Zendesk is a BAA-compliant platform that expedited our workflows a lot. We no longer need external tools to provide or get data from customers. We can now do everything directly in Zendesk.” Use out-of-the-box reporting and analytics to measure your team’s performance and spot recurring customer trends, or customize and build your own. Zendesk is the complete service solution you can count on both now and in the future. With our technology, you’ll bring ease to customers, increase your team’s productivity, and identify ways to grow your business. Your support staff can easily manage conversations by tagging and assigning them to the right team member.

There is always a heavy market for the best “free” solution option, especially with a customer support management system. Freshdesk, primarily thanks to its robust ticketing system and wide range of support channels, is the top free option available. Additionally, the free ticket creation automations, collaboration tools, and dashboard reporting of ticket volume trends can add substantial value to a small business. We were pleasantly surprised at the many choices that small businesses have when it comes to attractive and versatile small business CRMs. In this roundup, we’ve included leading vendors with products or plans aimed explicitly at SMBs.

Overall, we think Workbooks is a fantastic CRM platform when used for its intended purpose – providing CRM software solutions to midsize organizations. Paid plans unlock additional capabilities from HubSpot’s Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs, allowing seamless integration across platforms. Backing it up with a reliable service can increase your chances of fighting through the competition, winning your first customers, and laying the foundation for future growth.

The Swarming feature lets teams collaborate on cases by adding agents with specific skills to a dedicated Slack channel. Freshdesk is help desk software that unifies customer messages into one continuous thread. No matter where customers reach out to your support team, Freshdesk funnels those conversations into a single chat, making it easy to keep track of open conversations and recall important information. And, Freshdesk has a mobile interface, so agents can respond to tickets even when they’re not at the office or near their computers. Zendesk is a customer service solution that provides omnichannel support through email, live chat, voice, and various social media platforms. It connects all your data sources into a unified location, ensuring the right information is always available when a customer reaches out.

If 2023 was the year the world discovered generative AI (gen AI), 2024 is the year organizations truly began using—and deriving business value from—this new technology. In the latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI, 65 percent of respondents report that their organizations are regularly using gen AI, nearly double the percentage from our previous survey just ten months ago. Availability is dependent on network capacity and coverage, specific to your business location.

While the amount of digital data available these days can seem excessive, in the case of your business, it’s hugely beneficial. It’s valuable knowledge to have access to every customer interaction, visit, chat and review. Not retrieving and retaining this information is like leaving money on the table because it’s data that can be used to improve customer service. Talkdesk is a cloud-based contact center solution known for its robust AI capabilities and omnichannel engagement features.

CRM software can provide a wealth of benefits for your small business, from customer retention to increased productivity. The first paid tier in CRM software, which generally works well for small businesses, tends to be between $8 to $29 a month per user, charged on a yearly basis. Many CRM solutions can integrate with software including Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, Mailchimp, and business intelligence programs such as Microsoft Power BI. Without a CRM solution, you’d be doing significant manual work to store, track, and interact with contacts, and the sales pipeline would be more sluggish without automation or reminders. Bitrix24 is an all-in-one CRM platform that does much more than generate and manage leads. Apart from that, you can use it to automate your workflows and monitor the activities of your sales representatives with ease.

• In general, these benefits all involve nurturing leads and supporting customers as they enter and move through your sales and marketing funnels.
• To tap into SMB customers, the company has built Salesforce Essentials, which it’s billing as an all-new platform explicitly built to entice small businesses.
• Yes, most customer service software can integrate with other business tools like CRM systems, marketing software, and sales platforms.

Use these 17 omni-purpose examples of customer service canned responses and see how much time you’ll save yourself. You can get unlimited tickets, ticket history, ticket ratings, routing, and more perks if you pay $10 per user a month (Essentials) or $15 per user a month (Premium) if billed annually. So, if you’re in IT, HR, marketing, or any other related industry, get a demo with HappyFox to request the prices for Mighty, Fantastic, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus agent-based plans. All of them come with unlimited mailboxes, work schedules, custom roles, and other classy stuff. Ask about Starter, Growth, Scale, or Scale Plus plans if you want to go with an unlimited agent plan.

Modern CRM software has many functions, but the software was created to improve business-customer relationships and that’s still its main benefit. This ensures that your employees have all they need to know about the customer at their fingertips and can provide a better customer experience, which tends to boost customer satisfaction. Freshsales CRM is limited in terms of lead generation tools, such as business card scanners. It does, however, feature customizable web forms, capturing lead data from your website and automatically assigning sales leads. Other features include several thousand Bot sessions per month depending on the plan, a visual sales pipeline, and Contact Lifestyle management. While enviable, HubSpot’s combined sales and marketing functionality comes with a steep price.

It offers many functions found in paid services, such as the ability to capture multiple tickets, chat transcripts and real-time visitor monitoring. My LiveChat has customizable features, allowing you to modify your display text, prechat surveys and offline messages. The software can be accessed on the web and Windows, Mac, Android and iOS devices.

Ensure your helpdesk software includes all essential features, such as a comprehensive dashboard, an inbuilt ticketing system, live chat support, and efficient reporting. Here are some mistakes to avoid while purchasing customer support software. Digital channels have become increasingly important as customer support platforms, especially following the rise of social media. To deliver an excellent customer service experience, you need to consider digital and social channels. Various customer service solutions can help your support team, decrease response times, and allow your business to improve support agent performance overall. While there is no clear data to identify the most popular customer support software, many providers have products that are highly acclaimed and adopted by small businesses.

In those instances, live chat is a great option since it offers the immediacy of phone support while being less resource-intensive. It also has a much higher average customer satisfaction rating when compared to phone — 82% satisfied for live chat vs. 44% for phone. These days, phone support (also referred to as “voice”) may seem like a relic of the past, so it may surprise you to know that over 50% of customers use the phone to contact customer service.

Moving up from the free tier gets us to the Professional tier at a cost of $450/month. While it does support 5 users at that price, has a product library and forecasting, and supports eSignatures, that price point may be a barrier for smaller businesses. We think it is a missed opportunity that there are no additional tiers of plans to choose from, with an appropriately lower price of entry.

We also look at the depth of online knowledge bases, specifically whether they include articles, FAQs or video tutorials that allow users to find solutions independently. The software has a lot of the same features seen in other tools on this list, like a shared inbox for handling email and live chat requests, as well as a knowledge base for self-service support. The platform also comes with more specialized tools designed for incident and asset management. HappyFox helpdesk has many features like live chat, a customer self-service knowledge base, a ticketing system, and much more. It offers multichannel support and helps you respond to customer queries via email, chat, social media, phone calls, etc. In addition to first-hand experience with these customer service management platforms, we evaluated what actual users say about each product according to online reviews.

S-corp status offers pass-through taxation to small corporations that meet certain IRS requirements. Larger companies and startups hoping to attract venture capital are usually taxed as C-corps. LLCs can be owned by one or more people or companies and must include a registered agent.

And second, they’re able to develop an on-ramp to their flagship products as these customers grow. That’s even more valuable now that most CRM companies revamp these platforms into software hubs that let them sell additional sales and marketing software. These new tools plug into the CRM’s framework and customers use them via the same UI. Freshsales is an outstanding entry-level CRM for early-stage businesses, but it also offers a reasonably deep feature set for people who already have some experience with CRM. It provides an AI assistant, integrations with other business software, and customization options for people who have specific workflows in mind. Your customer service software is critical to your support team’s day-to-day operations, so finding the right mix of tools is a big deal.

For marketing, this means engaging your prospects with the right message, at the right time, through targeted digital marketing campaigns and journeys. Sales reps can work faster and smarter with a clear view of their pipeline and accomplish more accurate forecasting. Unlike the early days, today’s CRM software lives in the cloud, giving you the ability to safely save and access all of your customer data from anywhere at any time.

When she launched her career as a writer, she worked with companies from the US, Australia, and China. At present, she uses her 12+ years of writing experience to provide FSB readers with the best answers to their questions. Help Scout is slightly more limited in languages, as it only directly supports English.

There’s also a bundled package known as the Zendesk Suite, which combines multiple products and starts at a higher price point. When utilized effectively, customer service software can greatly improve the relationship between a business and its customers. Check out all the reviews in this roundup, and you might find that a smaller solution may work better for your organization.

Tidio can automatically assign tickets to agents and close them upon resolution. The software can also send an automated satisfaction survey once the interaction is over. Agents can seamlessly respond to customer requests across any channel from a single workspace, eliminating the need to switch between dashboards. They can see key information like a customer’s past support issues and seamlessly build a 360-degree customer view with over 1,500 plug-and-play integrations.

Most service desks with customer tracking and reporting tools will also auto-generate graph reports for simple viewing and analysis. An omnichannel agent workspace provides a dashboard with a unified view of customer data, interactions across channels, and ticket history (aka the entire customer journey) for all departments to access. An omnichannel workspace allows businesses to meet customers where they are. It gives agents, management, sales reps, and anyone who interacts with consumers the context they need to deliver a high-quality customer experience at scale. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Our comparison chart offers swift insights into pricing, free trial options, and key features so you can make informed decisions that align with your customer support needs.

A fully customizable platform allows businesses to tailor their software to meet their organizational needs, now and in the future. Open and flexible software enables teams to unlock a plethora of customization options with apps and integrations, both code and no code. For example, businesses without developer budgets can utilize no-code integrations to quickly and easily extend the capabilities of their software. But companies wanting to create more complex use cases should consider an open platform like Zendesk Sunshine, which lets developers customize the code to their heart’s content. Gorgias also has a customizable interface, allowing businesses to build workflows that automatically assign, tag, and close tickets.

Just note that Salesforce can be complex and may take users longer to learn. The customer service platform from Salesforce provides agents with an omnichannel workspace for customer support. Agents can view each ticket’s relevant context within their workspace, including customer contact details, prior interactions, and purchase history.

Help Scout’s free trial gives you and your team 15 days to try out everything that our platform has to offer, with our team supporting you every step of the way. Messaging tools are a broad category referring to software that allow you to do some sort of proactive support. That could come in the form of chatbot software, proactive messaging software, or some combination of the two. It may be helpful to think of an internal knowledge base as geared toward your employees, while an external knowledge base is geared toward your customers.

Smaller CRM vendors compete by expanding their capabilities as much as possible while keeping the whole solution simple enough to entice SMBs. Some do this by adding artificial intelligence (AI) and business intelligence, but most focus on building as many third-party software integrations as possible. For instance, Pipedrive CRM offers quick chatbots customers can drop into their sites, while Zendesk Sell plugs into the wider array of Zendesk help desk tools. Meanwhile, Freshsales CRM has also bumped up its integrations and tacked on workflow automation and better sales analytics. Customer service platforms with built-in AI and automation can improve team productivity by lending agents a helping hand and reducing manual work. For example, generative AI tools can streamline knowledge management by flagging articles that are ready for a refresh and helping agents write new pieces.

Beyond the features mentioned, Buffer has reporting capabilities to help track performance and post engagement. If most of your support requests come through social media channels, then a stand-alone social media management tool like Buffer might be a good choice. The platform allows you to engage with customers across many social platforms, including X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Freshdesk also has a few features such as an AI responder and field service management tools that are offered as à la carte add-ons.