Customer Support: The 20 best apps to power up your business

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Do you know how many positive customer support experiences it takes to make up for a single negative one According to Understanding Customers by Ruby Newell-Legner, it can take 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience.

Additionally, news of bad customer services reaches more than twice as many ears as praise for a good service experience. That means it’s 12 times as hard to make up for a bad experience and twice as many people will hear about a bad experience as hear about a good one.

That’s how important it is to make sure your clients have an experience that wows them.

Great customer service leads to successful businesses—it really is that simple. Today’s customers want instant gratification and they expect an omnichannel experience. From Facebook to email, customers want to be able to reach you everywhere when they need customer service solutions.

To handle transactions in real-time across all these platforms, businesses need to adjust. This creates a need for great customer service apps to lighten the load and provide amazing customer service to your customers in real-time.

20 Customer Service Apps to Power Up Any Business

We’ve put together a nonexhaustive list of services we are using or have been using in the past. Depending on what growth stage your business is at, you might find one service more suitable for your needs than another, but here are some of our favorites.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM that boasts low setup costs, no hardware or software, and no hassles. It allows you to track and manage contacts from lead to customer, personalize your pitches to your customer data, automate repetitive tasks, and improve your productivity. In addition to improving sales by an average of 37%, Salesforce also keeps your data secure.

HubSpot

HubSpot provides a variety of mobile solutions in addition to outstanding content marketing. The HubSpot app allows you to view analytics reports and manage contacts on the go. Beyond that, it has a host of social media functions you can use for social monitoring, writing, and scheduling posts.

Zoho

Zoho offers a series of apps that are specifically created to help you easily and quickly enhance the functionality of your business while on the go. It allows you to capture leads, digitize business cards, access your CRM, act as an email admin, and search effortlessly.

Zendesk

Zendesk allows you to provide great customer support and is built for team leaders, agents, and those who work on the go. It also allows you to create new tickets on the fly, update Macros, check notifications, find the right tickets immediately, access reports, and dip into the agent dashboard to get an overview of any queue.

Slack

Slack is a must-have communication app that allows you to collaborate with your team on the go. It allows you to drag, drop, and share files and link to Google Drive, Dropbox, and other storage services. You can also set up Slack to work with your other tools and apps so that you don’t need to constantly be switching between tools eliminating the need to remember passwords and time-consuming logins.

Intercom

Intercom is a customer platform that has a suite of products to support live chat, marketing, and support. Its tools work for web, iOS, and Android apps. Some of the more popular and useful Intercom apps are Acquire, which lets you chat with visitors on your website; Engage, which allows you to onboard new users; and Support, which allows your customers to reach out for help in your app, through email, or across social media. The thing that makes Intercom unique is that all its products work together and are powered by live customer data.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a small-business CRM service that allows you to quickly access your to-do list and contacts on the go with a simple search. It also allows you to add meetings and call notes, enables truly mobile selling, and has full call tracking capability. This app works offline as well so you can keep working even when you don’t have an Internet connection. Our Pipedrive integration suits both sales and support teams.

Crisp

Crisp is the ultimate all-in-one multichannel customer support platform that helps businesses connect instantly with their customers or leads waiting for support. With its quickly evolving set of tools, Crisp is leading companies through the customer-driven revolution by using conversations to unlock hypergrowth.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email service with a great easy-to-use app that will allow you to manage your lists, add new subscribers, send campaigns, and view reports all with just a few taps on your smartphone.

Drift

A messaging app to help you grow your business, Drift allows you to talk to your website visitors from Slack without having to log out, makes it easy to target your message to the right person, and lets you capture email addresses inside the live chat feature. But that’s not all; you can also message your clients with in-app messages and surveys. Additionally, Drift works with other apps like HubSpot and Mailchimp to seamlessly integrate Drift into your existing workflow.

Zapier

Zapier allows you to connect your apps and automate your workflows. It allows you to automatically move info between your web apps, freeing you up to focus on more important work. Zapier integrates all your web apps so they can pass info between the apps in workflows called “Zaps”. This lets you build processes quickly and easily (without having to code them).

Front

Front is email redesigned for teams. This unique email manager allows you to centralize all your company’s email communications in one collaborative inbox. Front is easy to use with almost no learning curve and allows you to get rid of messy inboxes to get work done faster.

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a help desk app, which allows you to support customers across email, phone, chat, Facebook, Twitter, and your website. It gives you a quick overview of your help desk so you can prioritize the tickets that matter most. You can use filters to prioritize urgent tickets, add watchers, change ticket details, use automations, delete tickets, and mark tickets as spam right from your phone. From there, you can also answer support calls, log time spent on a ticket, and link all your social accounts to create an omnichannel ecosystem.

Help Scout

Help Scout is a carefully crafted help desk that was designed to make the customer service process easier for the customer and for your team. Because it was specifically designed without all the typical help desk obstructions, you can provide a seamless customer service experience. Help Scout’s report features provide all the data and analytics you need, while the 40+ integrations allow you to pull in customer activity from other apps in seconds.

Mailjet

Mailjet is an email management app that allows you to manage your transactional and bulk emails. With real-time email monitoring, you can make sure email delivery is under control no matter where you are.

Olark

Olark is a live chat service that helps you figure out who your visitors are and what they are looking at on your website. You can even see who is placing what items in their shopping carts. Olark is a customizable application that helps you serve the specific customer service needs of your business. It also helps you build your website seamlessly.

Groove HQ

Groove HQ is a help desk software made specifically for small business needs. It’s more than just a help desk. It works to provide everything you need to transform support tickets into amazing customer service experiences. Groove HQ integrates with any email inbox to turn it into a customer service support center. It also helps you deliver a 24/7 knowledge base and makes it easy to add a customer service form to any page of your website.

Close

Close is a CRM service that focuses on helping you close more deals. It features a one-touch calling system, which gives you lead information as soon as someone calls. With auto-logging of calls, emails, and activity, you’ll never have to do date entry again. Close is a sales CRM created by salespeople for salespeople in Elastic’s sales lab. Close also integrates with Zapier integrations letting you do everything from creating website contact forms to newsletters.

ServiceRocket

ServiceRocket provides training, services, and support to allow software companies to extend, enhance, and accelerate the delivery of their services. It delivers exceptional training support and consulting services to both large and small businesses.

Aircall

A cloud-based call center software, Aircall works with fast-moving teams to help manage their customer service and sales call needs. Aircall allows you to get local phone numbers, assigns each team a different number to prevent missed calls, and integrates with 100+ business tools. Learn more by scheduling a call with us today!

Published on September 22, 2016.