The 16 Best Customer Service Software Platforms for 2024

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Think about a store that only sells one size of clothes. That wouldn’t work well for most people, right? It’s the same with tools for helping customers. Every business has its own way of doing things.

Some companies say their tool works for everyone. But that’s not always true. Each business has its own way of talking to customers.

We made this guide to help you find the right customer service software for your team. We’ll show you what to look for and tell you about some good options. This will help you pick a tool that works best for your business.

This is a chapter in our Ultimate Guide to Running a Customer Service Team. When you’re ready, check out the other chapters:

Table of Contents

What is customer service software?

Customer service software helps businesses handle customer questions and problems. It’s a set of tools that work together to make customer support easier.

This software can manage different ways customers reach out, like email, chat, or messaging. It can also connect with other tools a business uses, such as social media.

Most companies use this software online, which is called cloud-based. This lets many support agents use the same tool at once, making customer support faster and more efficient.

The 16 best customer service software platforms

To help you get a jump-start on finding the support tool that’s just right for your team, we’ve put together this list of tools that range from help and service desks to social media management solutions.

Help Scout
HelpDocs
Olark
Aircall
Zendesk
Freshdesk
Text-Em-All
Buffer
Helpshift
HubSpot Service Hub
Salesforce Service Cloud
LiveAgent
ServiceNow
Zoho Desk
Jira Service Management
Sprout Social

1. Help Scout

Best all-in-one customer service software.

Growing teams don’t often have huge budgets or tons of time to invest in setting up and learning a new tool, so they need something sophisticated enough to cover all the bases, simple enough to get up and running quickly, and flexible enough to grow with them over time. Help Scout checks all of these boxes.

Help Scout is focused on providing a great experience for both your customers and your support team:

Manage email, live chat, and social media requests from one centralized tool. Customers can contact you from wherever they’re most comfortable, and your team can work in a single support queue that contains all of your customer requests.
Build a customizable help center with Docs to empower customers to get the answers they need on their own while reducing the number of support requests your team has to answer.
Use AI features to help get customers the answers they need quickly. AI summarize makes it easier to get up to speed on issues by creating on-demand conversation summaries. AI assist can help you easily polish your copy. Use it across all Help Scout editors (Inbox, Docs, and Messages) to adjust length and tone, fix spelling and grammar mistakes, and translate text into other languages.
With customer profiles, you’re able to see past interactions and customer data from connected apps to help provide more personalized customer support.
Collaborate across your organization more effectively with light users — a non-customer-facing user role that comes at no additional cost for Plus and Pro plan subscribers.
Offer proactive support during tricky parts of the customer journey, or get quick customer feedback with messages and microsurveys.
Help Scout comes loaded with pre-built reports so you can see how your team is performing from day one. See metrics showing what times of day are busiest, common reasons for support requests, average response times, and which channels are most popular with your customers.

With a few plans to choose from, Help Scout is a great option for any team.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $22/user per month.

2. HelpDocs

Best customer service software for stand-alone knowledge bases.

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.

Knowledge bases empower customers to find answers on their own, which means a faster resolution time for them and fewer tickets for your team.

HelpDocs is a strong contender for those looking to invest in a stand-alone piece of knowledge base software. Their straightforward pricing, robust feature set, and easy-to-use interface all make setting up your first knowledge base a breeze.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $55 per month (includes five users).

3. Olark

Best customer service software for stand-alone live chat.

If your team needs to communicate with customers in real time, live chat is a great option. It provides the immediacy of phone support but at a lower cost, making it ideal for small businesses.

Things like team management, robust analytics, smart automations, and a host of other features mean Olark can meet the needs of almost any team.

Olark has straightforward pricing, no term commitments on most plans, and the ability to add certain features à la carte. That means you can get the features you want and skip the ones you don’t need, making it ideal for smaller teams.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $29/seat per month.

4. Aircall

Best customer service software for call center support.

Though phone support is sometimes associated with bigger teams, it can still be an integral part of a small business’s support efforts, especially for those with products and services that require more complex solutions. Statistics show that customers prefer to troubleshoot complex issues in person or on the phone with a live representative.

Aircall offers a number of different plans suited to teams of all sizes. All their plans include phone support essentials like IVR, the ability to set custom business hours, and call queuing. Having those core features on all plans means your team can get phone support up and running quickly.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $30/license per month (minimum of three users).

5. Zendesk

Best customer service software for larger teams.

Zendesk is a ticketing system used to manage customer conversations. With any Zendesk plan, you’re able to manage email, Twitter, and Facebook conversations. On their higher-cost plans, you’re also able to manage phone and chat conversations.

Though Zendesk is generally associated with larger teams because of the relative complexity of the product, resources needed for initial setup, and overall cost, they do have a few lower-cost plans.

Those lower-cost plans do lack some features but should cover the basics for those with a primary focus on email support.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/agent per month.

6. Freshdesk

Best customer service software for enterprise teams.

Freshdesk has two support offerings: one for just a help desk solution and one that covers omnichannel support.

There are plan tiers within both, but the help desk solution is a lower cost on average when compared to the omnichannel product, and it’s probably a good starting place for most small businesses.

As with Zendesk’s lower-cost plans, it only covers email, Twitter, and Facebook messages, so if you’re looking for other channels, you’d need to look at the omnichannel support tiers.

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. We will note, however, that the AI functionality is only available on the higher-cost omnichannel support plans.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $15/agent per month.

7. Text-Em-All

Best customer service software for automating phone communications.

Sending out mass communication over the phone can be time consuming and costly, but it’s sometimes necessary. A dedicated tool can help combat both of those issues. Text-Em-All is one of the best in the business for automated phone communication.

The platform offers the ability to automate phone calls or manage mass text messaging. 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.

Text-Em-All offers transparent pricing, and they even offer the ability to calculate costs using a handy cost calculator on their site. Along with straightforward pricing, they also offer a user-friendly interface and top-notch support to make sure all your needs and concerns are addressed.

Price: Free plan and trial available. Monthly plans start at $10 per month.

8. Buffer

Best customer service software for social media management.

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.

While many help desks have the ability to manage social-based customer requests, a tool like Buffer will also let you schedule and post to social platforms and manage your company’s content calendar. Beyond the features mentioned, Buffer has reporting capabilities to help track performance and post engagement.

Buffer’s free plan is great for those just getting started with social media — it only offers one user seat but allows for the management of three social channels. For teams further along in their social media strategies, Buffer offers paid plans that charge by channel, with higher-tiered plans offering unlimited user seats.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $5/channel per month.

9. Helpshift

Best customer service software for providing support in a mobile app.

Helpshift is a leader in in-app support, specifically focusing on providing in-app support for mobile applications. It allows customers to receive help when and where they need it most via both chat and self-service channels. Agents are able to manage incoming customer messages from a unified agent desktop that lets them see customer data and interaction history to aid in providing contextual support.

Helpshift has flexible, use-based pricing to ensure your team only pays for what you need. For instance, they offer a free plan for teams that are only looking to collect feedback from users.

Couple that with simple setup and strong support from their team, and we think Helpshift is a great option for anyone looking for in-app support for their mobile properties.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $150 per month.

10. HubSpot Service Hub

Best customer service software for large businesses that already use HubSpot.

You might be familiar with HubSpot for its CRM or marketing resources. Their customer service offering, Service Hub, has the usual benefits of a shared inbox, team email, live chat, email templates, canned snippets, and reporting dashboards.

Service Hub is most useful for teams that already use HubSpot products, in particular its CRM. The products integrate seamlessly, and having contextual data available makes it easier for agents to personalize their support efforts.

Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $18 per month (includes two user seats).

11. Salesforce Service Cloud

Best customer service software for teams providing support via Slack.

Salesforce is best known as a sales CRM tool, but they also offer Service Cloud, a customer support platform. It can be a good option for teams that are looking to provide support over Slack, as Service Cloud integrates natively with Slack.

Beyond Slack, you can use Salesforce Service Cloud to provide support via email, live chat, and self-service channels. The platform also offers add-ons like field service and AI tools and can integrate easily with Salesforce’s CRM for added customer insights.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $25/user per month.

12. LiveAgent

Best customer service software for teams interested in gamification.

LiveAgent combines communication from email, calls, and social media into a unified dashboard. The software offers simple setup, integration with the rest of their platform, and tools to help team productivity.

What sets LiveAgent apart from all the other tools we’ve mentioned is its gamification approach to customer support. Teams can earn points and rewards for completing tasks, making customer support fun for your team.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $9/agent per month.

13. ServiceNow

Best customer service software for IT teams at enterprise companies.

ServiceNow is a service ticket management platform that helps you manage internal requests.

ServiceNow offers advanced features like AI-assisted ticket routing to help boost productivity. Self-service options and virtual assistants help employees get answers quickly, and reports mean you’re able to track performance and find areas of improvement.

Price: Contact for pricing.

14. Zoho Desk

Best customer service software for sales-focused teams.

Zoho is another company that is probably best known for its CRM, but it has also made the move into help desk software. Zoho Desk has a number of features like a shared inbox, phone integration, and chat. However, some of those features — like chat — are limited to the highest-cost plan.

Zoho Desk also boasts a strong selection of integrations to connect with the rest of your tech stack. For larger teams, there are team management features you can take advantage of, like time tracking. They even offer AI options for self-service, though that feature is also limited to the highest-cost plan.

Price: Free plan and trial available. Plans start at $7/user per month.

15. Jira Service Management

Best free customer service software for IT teams.

Most people will recognize the Jira brand name from the project management and issue tracking software often used by development teams. Jira Service Management is a service management platform that helps IT teams better handle incidents and their related requests.

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.

Unlike ServiceNow, Jira’s pricing is very straightforward, and they even offer a free plan that includes up to three agent seats.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $22.05/agent per month.

16. Sprout Social

Best social media customer service solution for enterprise companies.

If you’re an enterprise company that provides a lot of customer care over social media channels, then Sprout Social could be a good choice. Sprout Social has all of the social media features your marketing team needs to engage with your audience and all of the customer service tools necessary to provide great social care.

Sprout Social integrates with all of the major social media networks including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Pinterest, and TikTok. There are solid collaborative tools for post management such as a social content calendar, a review and post-approval flow, and tools to help you properly optimize and time your content. There are also social listening features to help you keep an eye out for mentions of your company across the web.

When it comes to social media customer service, Sprout Social has a shared inbox that allows your team to easily manage and respond to customer comments and direct messages. Use saved replies for quick responses, automations and chatbots to help handle lower priority tasks, AI features to help agents craft better responses, sentiment analysis to help prioritize cases, and customer satisfaction (CSAT) and NPS surveys to measure performance.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $249 per month. Additional users can be added for $199/user per month.

Customer service software:	Starting price:	Supported channels:	Key features:	Best for:
Help Scout	Free trial available. Plans start at $20/user per month	Email Contact form Live chat Social media Knowledge base	Shared inbox Workflow automations AI tools In-app messaging Integrations Reporting dashboards	Growing businesses
HelpDocs	Free trial available. Plans start at $55 per month		WYSIWYG editor with markdown and HTML support Team accounts w/user roles Article versioning Integrations Reporting dashboards	Stand-alone knowledge bases
Olark	Free trial available. Plans start at $29/seat per month (with one-year contract)		Round-robin routing Searchable transcripts Chatbots In-app messaging Reporting dashboards	Stand-alone live chat
Aircall	Free trial available. Plans start at $30/license per month (minimum three users)	Voice SMS (text) messaging	Shared call inbox Interactive voice response (IVR) Call transcripts Integrations Reporting dashboards	Call centers
Zendesk	Free plan and trial available. Plans start at $19/agent per month *some channels and features only available via Zendesk Suite plans	Email Contact form Voice SMS (text) messaging Social media Live chat/messaging Knowledge base Community forums	Omnichannel support Workflows and automations Chatbots Integrations Reporting dashboards	Larger teams
Freshdesk	Free plan and trial available. Paid plans start at $15/agent per month *some channels and features only available via the omnichannel plan	Email Contact form Voice SMS (text) messaging Social media Live chat Knowledge base Community forums	Shared inbox Round-robin routing Chatbots Integrations Reporting dashboards	Enterprise teams
Text-Em-All	Free plan available. Paid plans start at $10 per month	SMS (text) messaging Voice	Templates Surveys Live transfers Integrations Reporting dashboards	Automated voice communication
Buffer	Free individual plan and trial available. Paid plans start at $5 per month		Post scheduling Approval workflows Hashtag manager Custom link shortener Reporting dashboards	Social media management
Helpshift	Free trial available. Plans start at $150 per month (includes unlimited agent seats)	Email Customer portal/contact form Live chat Knowledge base	Shared inbox Chatbots Web and in-app messaging Integrations Reporting dashboards	In-app support
HubSpot Service Hub	Free plan available. Paid plans start at $18 per month (includes two user seats)	Email Customer portal/contact form Live chat Social media Voice Knowledge base	Shared inbox Chatbots Meeting scheduling Integrations Reporting dashboards	Current Hubspot customers
Salesforce Service Cloud	Free trial available. Plans start at $25/user per month *some channels and features only available on higher-tiered plans or as add-ons	Email Customer portal/contact form Live chat Social media SMS (text) messaging Knowledge base Community forums	Shared inbox Workflow automations Chatbots Integrations Reporting dashboards	Slack support
LiveAgent	Free plan and trial available. Paid plans start at $9/agent per month	Email Customer portal/contact form Live chat Social media Voice Video calling Knowledge base Community forums	Shared inbox Rule-based automations Gamification Integrations Reporting dashboards	Teams interested in gamification
ServiceNow	Contact for quote	Email Customer service portal/contact form Live chat Social media Messaging Voice Knowledge base	Shared inbox Chatbots Field service and asset management Integrations Reporting dashboards	Enterprise company IT teams
Zoho Desk	Free plan and trial available. Paid plans start at $7/user per month	Email Contact form Live chat Social media Messaging Voice Knowledge base	Shared inbox Workflow automations Chatbots Integrations Reporting dashboards	Sales-focused teams
Jira Service Management	Free plan available. Paid plans start at $22.05/agent per month	Email Self-service portal/contact form Live chat Knowledge base	Shared inbox Incident alerts Asset and service management Integrations Reporting dashboards	IT teams
Sprout Social	Free trial available. Plans start at $249 per month. Additional users can be added for $199/user per month	Social media	Post scheduling Approval workflows Shared inbox Social listening tools Reporting dashboard	Enterprise social media management

What are the benefits of using a customer service platform?

You can certainly deliver great customer support without using specialist software, and many online businesses start out with nothing more than a free email account. Soon though, growing companies tend to run into some limitations and rough edges.

Using a specialized customer service system helps you to create a better customer experience that improves customer loyalty. Here are the key ways you can use a specialized tool to enable those experiences:

Give more responsive and more consistent support. Dedicated support software features like automated workflows, tagging, knowledge base integration, saved replies, AI, and more help your team spend more time helping customers and less time fighting their tools.
Gather customer insights. Identify, collect, and organize all the helpful feedback, feature requests, bug reports, and use cases so they can be used to improve customer satisfaction.
Work better together. Customer service software enables you to reduce duplicated work, keep track of customer queries, coordinate a response across multiple teams, and deliver up-to-date answers.
Analyze and report. Use the built-in reporting features of customer support software to understand changes in support volume, team productivity, type and size of customer, and much more.
Scale up your service. Maintain high-quality service as you grow by using tools that can coordinate multiple teams of agents to support an enormous customer base, using organizational features, automations, and third-party integrations.

When you have more than a couple of people working together to support customers, using specialized customer service software is the right choice.

What are the different types of customer service tools?

Building out a customer service program is similar to building a chair. You could — in theory — build either one with just two or three tools, but the overall quality and efficiency of your efforts would be greatly impacted.

Whether you’re building a chair or a support team, there’s a continuum of tools ranging from broad to specialized, and the tools you end up investing in will be a reflection of the stage you’re at in the craft and the resources available to you.

To determine which tools are right for you, consider the following nine types of customer support software.

1. Help desk software

Help desk software is typically one of the first tools teams invest in. It helps centralize all your service-related customer interactions, and, depending on the tool, it can handle support requests from multiple channels like email, live chat, social media, and phone.

At its core, help desk software lets you manage and streamline customer conversations to create a better customer experience and agent experience.

2. Shared inbox software

Shared inbox software is an email tool that allows multiple people to access and respond to messages sent to a specific email address. There are generally also other organization and automation features included to help effectively manage customer conversations.

Now, you may be thinking — isn’t that the same thing as a help desk? Kind of. Shared inbox software is like a lite version of help desk software, since it tends to focus mainly on email interactions and not on the additional channels that a help desk may cover.

3. Phone support software

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.

Furthermore, it’s not limited to one demographic: People of every age, gender, and background opt for phone support. So no matter what industry you’re in, you probably have customers who would be happy to give you a call.

Phone support and contact center software is a more modern approach to handling those phone-based interactions.

4. Knowledge base software

Knowledge base software is a tool that allows you to create, store, organize, manage, and share self-service content with an audience. Things like FAQ pages, video tutorials, and how-to articles are all common types of content housed in a knowledge base.

Generally speaking, there are two main types of knowledge bases: internal and external. With an internal knowledge base, content is private and may require the user to log in to access the information, whereas an external knowledge base is public and accessible to anyone.

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.

Some tools focus more on one use case over another, but there are also some capable of doing both well.

5. Live chat support software

Sometimes customers want to talk to a live person. Maybe they’re not finding what they need in your help documentation or they want to talk through an issue in real time and email simply won’t cut it.

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.

In order to offer live chat support, you first need access to live chat software. Similar to some other tools on this list, live chat software can be a stand-alone product, but it can also be included as part of a help desk’s larger suite of tools.

6. Messaging tools

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.

In any case, the core goal of a messaging tool is to reduce friction in some way or another for the customer. Data confirm people generally prefer tasks that require less effort.

7. CRM software

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a tool that lets businesses manage and track customer interactions. It’s most commonly associated with sales, but there are some customer success applications for it, too.

The primary way it can help with customer success is through personalization. With the data you’ve collected, you might be able to better anticipate needs and curate a specific experience for each customer based on where they’re at in their customer journey.

Research shows personalization pays off: One study found that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that offers a personalized experience.

8. Social media customer service software

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.

The common suggestion is to “meet your customers where they already are.” Though that sounds like good advice, every team has limitations on time and resources, so it’s important to create a social media customer service strategy that matches your team’s budget and goals.

For some, that might mean using your marketing team’s existing social media management platform to handle customer inquiries, while for others it might be the use of software integrations to bring social networks into your help desk.

Beyond basic request management, social monitoring software can also be a great social media customer service tool. It helps you watch out for mentions of your company, competitors, and industry on social channels, giving you a heads up to issues so that they can be handled proactively.

9. Service desk software

Sometimes referred to as a ticketing system, service desk software is more IT-focused and is used to manage internal requests for technical assistance. It’s not software that your customer service team would use directly, but it can be important for managing certain customer issues.

For example, many teams use a ticketing system to manage bugs reported by customers. So even though your customer service team isn’t managing conversations directly in the tool, it’s very common for them to have some interaction with it.

What are the most common customer service software features?

The feature set of software platforms built for customer service covers a wide range, but it can be generally categorized into six major focus areas.

1. Collecting

Collecting features help you answer the question, “How do we get customer communications into this system so we can handle them?” They provide the first point of interaction between the customer and the customer service software.

Common examples include a support@-type email address, “contact us” forms that funnel messages into a support inbox, phone numbers, messaging systems, and APIs.

Customer service software tools may include built-in interfaces for some channels and may integrate with external providers for others.

2. Organizing

Organizing features are for taking all that incoming communication and creating useful structures so customer service teams can manage high volumes, understand what needs to be done, and respond in a timely manner.

Organizational features in customer service software cover both tools for manually arranging things and tools for taking action automatically.

Common examples include:

Folders and views to easily look at subsets of the conversations.
Tags to label conversations for handling and reporting on later.
Workflows for taking actions automatically or manually, such as adding tags, assigning to the right person, or setting priorities.
Multiple mailboxes to separate different sets of customers or communications from each other.
Custom fields to capture useful information in a structured way about the request or the customer.

3. Collaborating

Collaboration features allow multiple people to effectively work together on the incoming support volume, from frontline support folks to subject experts and business operations folks.

Common collaboration features in customer service software include:

Teams so that each group in your organization can see the conversations most relevant to them.
The ability to assign conversations so that a conversation that requires a particular person’s skill can be clearly allocated to them.
Internal notes to allow staff to pass information between team members while keeping it associated with the customer conversation.
Private notes to give a team member a heads up about relevant information in a conversation without making them responsible for replying to the customer.

4. Responding

These features encompass all the ways a reply can be sent to the customer in question. Responding features can include:

Text editors for composing and sending responses to individual emails, live chats, and messages.
Social messaging tools to respond publicly to incoming requests.
Knowledge base systems for creating and publishing help documents to share with your customers.

5. Integrating

Many customer service software tools offer direct integration with other systems as well as APIs for programmatic integration into even more places. Integrations allow a company to connect their customer service data with tools like:

Slack or other communication systems for keeping your team up to date.
CRM software for additional customer history and context.
Shopify and other ecommerce services you use to serve customers.
Social tools for other forms of customer contact.
Internal systems that inform customer service decisions.

6. Analyzing and reporting

Features for reporting and analysis in customer service software allow companies to better understand things like who their customers are, what they are trying to get done, where their customers run into trouble, and what they need.

Common customer service software reporting features cover things like:

Time to first response.
Customer satisfaction levels.
Time to resolution.
Incoming request volume over time.
Common request categories.

Some of the features above are common across nearly every customer support platform; others are less common or are implemented quite differently.

What are the latest customer support software trends?

Regardless of the type, software is always evolving. Sometimes the changes are due to shifts in customer or industry expectations. Other times, updates stem from technological advances that allow developers to offer features that weren’t previously possible.

Here are a few trends that are being discussed in the world of customer service software.

Personalized conversations over ticket numbers

While the focus of conversations over tickets has been a guiding principle for some customer service platforms since their start, the idea has become more mainstream in recent years.

Customers aren’t interested in stiffly written scripts or one-size-fits-all email templates that never quite fit the issue at hand. Instead, customers want to have conversations with businesses where their concerns and needs are listened to and met in a timely manner.

This push for personalized support makes it even more important to choose a tool that gives your team access to customer information like past conversations and order history. Having customer data on hand ensures that they don’t need to repeat themselves, always receive relevant information, and never feel like a number.

Customers are voting with their dollars

Harris Poll research shows that “82% of shoppers want a consumer brand’s values to align with their own, and they’ll vote with their wallet if they don’t feel a match.”

While you might think that this need for value alignment is isolated to topics of manufacturing or hiring practices, your brand’s values can be seen in every aspect of your business, including the customer support experience you provide.

When shopping for customer service software, look for tools that have features that put the customer experience first. This includes both customer-facing features (easy to navigate knowledge bases, seamless in-app messaging, etc.) and agent-facing features (saved replies, workflows, tagging, etc.) that help your team provide great support.

Omnichannel experiences are expected

While offering email is still a must for most brands, other channels such as live chat, social media, and async messaging are emerging as customer favorites. Consumer surveys have found that 40% of consumers believe that having “multiple options for communicating” is the most important aspect of a company’s customer service.

Your support tools should offer the ability to manage communications through all of the channels that are widely used by your customers. Even if you’re not ready to launch them all at the start, having support for your business’s high-demand channels available within your customer service platform will make it easier to add additional communication methods in the future.

Self-service continues to be a customer favorite

A 2020 Zendesk report found that “69% of customers want to resolve as many issues as possible on their own and 63% of customers always or almost always start with a search on a company’s online resources when they have an issue.”

Customer service software that includes a knowledge base builder will allow you to create online resources that help customers find answers on their own while also relieving stress on your team.

Another self-service feature found in support software is chatbots. Rule-based chatbot experiences can help customers get help more quickly. While not suited for complex issues, chatbots can often help with issues like providing tracking information and processing returns and exchanges.

Teams can use AI to improve customer satisfaction and productivity

With the recent updates to ChatGPT, most customer support platforms have started to offer AI features built into their products.

Though their introduction may make your support team concerned about the future of their employment, the fact is that we’re not quite there yet. Though the improvements to ChatGPT are quite impressive, their accuracy levels are still too low to be used without human supervision.

Still, the technology offers a lot of opportunities to help your team behind the scenes. Look for AI features that can perform helpful tasks like summarizing long discussions or performing sentiment analysis to aid in the quality assurance process.

And yes, AI can also help your team come up with potential answers to customer issues — just make sure that a human reviews them for accuracy before hitting send!

How to choose the right customer service software

So which customer service software is the best for your business needs? To answer that, you should first start with another question:

“What is the experience I want my customers to have when they need my help?”

By answering that question, you give yourself some tools for selecting the right product or, more often, the right combination of products.

We have a full article on how to pick the right help desk tool — despite the title, it’s a handy guide for how to approach most customer service software decisions.

Here’s the short version:

Understand the job you are trying to do. Are you building a high-touch, hand-holding service experience for a select group or a mass-volume, fast-turnover retail service? Different software solutions suit different environments.
Assess your resources. If you’re a team of one or two, you can’t cover every support channel all day. And if you have a limited budget, there’s no point in looking at the more expensive systems.
Refine the list of possible options. Knowing what you have to work with and what you want to get done, narrow in on the most likely categories of customer service software you will use. Perhaps you want a shared inbox, a knowledge base, and live chat?
Understand the “must have” features. Does this system absolutely have to integrate with an existing tool? Or is having a messaging system essential? That will help you narrow down your options.
Create a shortlist. Using those must-have features, reviews, recommendations, and other sources of insight, pick your top few options.
Evaluate your favorites. Now you can deep dive into your top few options, perhaps trying out their customer service and talking to existing customers.
Trial time! Using customer service software is the best way to know if it will work for you. All the feature checklists and marketing copy in the world won’t replace the experience of using the software in your setup to deliver service.

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.

Check out our extensive knowledge base, take a live class, or even get a one-on-one demo with one of our customer champions to learn how your team can get the most out of Help Scout.

Whatever you need, we’re here to help!

Remember that serving customers is the goal

Figuring out which customer service tool best serves you — and your team — can be a tricky task. You need to find a tool that meets your immediate needs and is flexible enough to cover future needs, all while staying within budget.

Though making a choice may seem a bit daunting, ending up with the wrong tool, dissatisfied customers, and frustrated team members is far worse. So take your time, be thoughtful, consider your options, and make the most informed decision you can.

No matter which software you choose, it’s the service you deliver to your customers that matters. Don’t let the search for the “perfect customer service software” stop you from defining and delivering the service experience that will keep those customers coming back.

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Emarketing World Admin, the driving force behind EmarketingWorld.online, is a seasoned expert in the field of digital marketing and e-commerce. With a wealth of experience and a passion for innovation, Emarketing World Admin has dedicated their career to helping businesses and entrepreneurs navigate the complexities of online marketing and achieve their digital goals. Through EmarketingWorld.online, they provide valuable insights, strategies, and tools to empower others in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing.### Early Life and Introduction to MarketingFrom an early age, Emarketing World Admin exhibited a keen interest in technology and communication. Growing up during the rise of the internet, they were fascinated by the potential of digital platforms to connect people and transform businesses. 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