Customers are essential. They are the reason businesses thrive. Not delivering customer service well is like closing your doors to opportunity! With a myriad of tools available for easing the customer service workflow, businesses have run out of excuses like:
- “We’re a startup. We’re strapped for cash.”
- “We’re bootsrapping. We decided to do everything by ourselves, so we can’t afford anything fancy.”
- “We don’t have the resources to manage our growing customer base.”
Technology is available—and affordable—today. It’s easier to provide customer service today than it ever was. Here are some of the best customer service apps that you should consider but might not have heard of yet:
1. Mailflo
Mailflo turns Gmail into full-fledged collaboration software. You can use it for team management, customer support management, and more but you never have to leave your inbox to do it when you use Mailflo.
Mailflo ties in with the “label” feature in your Gmail inbox and basically supercharges the feature so every email message marked as “support” gets labeled as such. Similarly, labels are automatically slapped onto basic categories for your business that you create such as “sales”, “operations”, “hiring”, “partners”, “clients”, etc.
2. HappyFox App
Customers are accessing the web using their mobile phones, so you should be offering mobile support to them.
HappyFox is a nifty, new, and capable app that can take your customer support wherever your customers are. Its goal is to minimize chaos and bring order to your customer support processes. You can use it to build a self-service knowledge base, develop community forums, and respond to support tickets from anywhere (including mobile).
The app also provides multilingual support, ticket grouping, reporting, role-based security, customization options, and multiple integrations.
3. HelpScout
The folks at HelpScout are just awesome, but that’s not the only winning point with HelpScout. It’s a help desk built for small businesses. Focusing on security, nimbleness, and increased productivity with streamlined workflows, it’s a tool that’s designed to make all of the behind the scenes efforts invisible to your customers but useful for your team.
You can use tags, saved replies, and notes, and you can build relationships instead of a just building a huge customer list of people who don’t even know you.
4. Loop by Benbria
It seems like the whole world is using social media, so your customers are likely to be hanging out there, too. If they are, it could be a nightmare just to monitor what’s being said about your brand. Think of Loop as your customer service app that plugs straight into your social media channels.
It monitors, reports, and makes it easier for your front-line staff to take immediate action on customer service issues, questions, and anything else your existing or potential customers might have on their minds.
5. GetSatisfaction
What do you think a well-grown community around your products and customers can do for your business? A lot, if you ask me.
Get Satisfaction isn’t just a customer service solution. It’s a fully capable community tool that not only allows you to do what every other customer support solution can but also allows you to have a knowledge base, community, and user-generated help section that other customers can contribute to.
What are your favorite customer service apps? Share them in the comments below.
About the Author
Arpitha Raipally is fashion designer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Fetchprofits, a digital marketing company.
