In a world where your customers can share their experiences with everyone they know at the click of a button, customer service can either make you or break you.
Great customer service can have a viral effect. Remember the little girl who complained to Sainsbury’s that their tiger bread should be called giraffe bread? Sainsbury’s replied with this cute letter and a gift card. The story was all over Twitter and Facebook. Not only did Sainsbury’s brighten up a little girl’s day, they got some priceless marketing out of it.
However, when a customer receives bad service, they’re likely to take to social networks to vent and warn their friends against using the company.
You should be doing everything you can to make your customers happy, after all, without them, you don’t have a business.
Here are 4 online tools that can help you give great customer service…
1. Help Scout
With hundreds of customer support emails coming in, it can be difficult to tell who’s ansimpleweb.co.ukered what, which issues are closed and what support you’ve offered that customer before.
Help Scout copies emails sent to your support email address to your Help Scout mailbox. Issues are assigned to members of your team and checked off when they’ve been closed.
2. Zendesk
Like Help Scout, Zendesk provides a ticketing system to help you manage support requests. Zendesk, however, takes customer communications from your website, email, phone, Twitter, Facebook and chat and lets you respond from one place.
Zendesk is a little more expensive than Help Scout but with so many more features we’d definitely recommend it for companies that get a large volume of support requests that are dealt with by several different support agents.
3. Rusic
Communities are a great way to offer support. Do it right and your customers could be helping you respond to support requests as well as offering you ideas for how to improve your product.
With Rusic, you can develop your own support forum where customers can post their issues and help other people with theirs.
4. Olark
Most of us hate phoning customer support but we know email support is usually very slow. Offering your customers live chat on your website is a great way to give quick and easy support.
Olark brings live chat to your website so you can offer support before visitors click away.
What tools do you use to provide great customer service? Let us know in the comments.
