Best Customer Service Software: The Complete Toolset for CS Teams [2023]

Customer service software and tools are geared towards promoting quality customer services and communication, hence improving your reputation. The tools enhance positive interactions and support fast response times, both of which are equivalent to happy clients.

However, with so many choices on the market, selecting the best customer service software can be challenging, especially for first-timers. Strap on your customer service toolbelt! In this article, you will find a complete toolset for customer service teams: from comprehensive help desk software to quality assurance tools and knowledge management platforms.

Check out the tools’ top features, pricing, and what’s special about them – and find a solution fit for your business.

Help Desk Software

Help Desk software enables organizations to respond more efficiently to users, allowing them to manage customer conversations, all under one platform. The system documents clients’ interactions and requests over social media, phone calls, email, and live chat, making it easy for the CS team to resolve them timely. Some trustworthy help desk vendors include:

Help Scout

Help Scout scales like any other help desk, but the customer experience feels personalized like email. Its clutter-free features keep teams of any size on the same page. Help Scout is trusted by 10,000+ customers in 140+ countries including Basecamp, Reddit, and Pocket.

✨ Help Scout’s reports will do all the heavy lifting for you from day one – no customization required.

Intercom

Intercom has over 30,000 paying customers all over the globe including companies like Microsoft, Sotheby’s, and Shopify. With Intercom, you can build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences across the customer journey. The world’s most successful companies use Intercom to deliver conversational customer experiences through chat, bots, and personalized messaging.

✨ Intercom has divided support into three layers: human, self-serve, and proactive – so you can deliver world-class support at any scale.

LiveAgent

The tool helps the customer support team manage clients’ requests by turning every engagement into a ticket. The software then distributes these tickets to a shared inbox. LiveAgent organizes customer requests and allows the CS team to streamline the information to other business areas.

✨ Reach your customers on the channels they use most, including email, voice calls, and social media.

Read more: New LiveAgent and Klaus Integration for Superb Support Quality

Front

Front streamline communication by connecting the whole CS department into one ticketing system. It utilizes a shared email box for easy access by all employees.

✨ With Front, it’s simple for every person in your company to have an impact on the customer experience.

Read more: New Klaus x Front Integration to Bring Customer Relationships to the Fore-Front

Zendesk Support

Zendesk’s service and engagement products are powerful and flexible, and scale to meet the needs of any business. Zendesk serves businesses across hundreds of industries, with more than 145,000 paid customer accounts offering service and support in over 30 languages.

✨ Zendesk’s support products are flexible and empower you to assist people when they need you most. Conversations flow seamlessly across all channels, leading to greater productivity and satisfaction all around.

Dixa

Dixa helps brands build stronger bonds with their customers and eliminate bad customer service by unifying all communication channels and customer data in one platform. This enables agents to help customers faster and have more meaningful conversations resulting in a better overall customer experience.

✨ With customer recognition features, Dixa makes it possible to know your customers the second they reach out.

Wix Answers

Wix Answers is a unified customer support platform. With all support channels built into a single platform, agents are more efficient and teams can gain deeper insights into their operations.

✨ Wix Answers uses a centralized, AI-powered approach to knowledge management that makes customers self-reliant, agents more effective, and organizations run more smoothly.

Helpshift

Helpshift is used by leading brands such as Microsoft, Supercell, Tencent, Virgin Media, BBVA, and more. Helpshift engages consumers across any device, app, or website with a messaging-based service experience.

✨ Enterprise capabilities such as customizable Bots, a high deflection knowledge base, and an AI-powered case management system helps leading brands deliver superior customer service.

On request

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service software that enables businesses of all sizes to deliver stellar customer support. Freshdesk converts requests coming in via email, web, phone, chat, and social into tickets, and unifies ticket resolution across channels. Over 150,000 customers including Toshiba, Cisco, and Honda trust Freshdesk to help them provide seamless customer support.

✨ Freshdesk lets you automate workflows, provide self-service, manage SLAs, and measure metrics, so you can stay on top of all things customer support.

Free and paid plans

Read more: 7 Freshdesk Integrations for Improving Support Quality

Kustomer

Kustomer is a customer service CRM platform built for managing high support volume by optimizing experiences throughout the customer service journey. Kustomer helps brands quickly resolve conversations on all digital channels by automating 40% of interactions via self-service, first contact resolution with intelligent routing, and driving omnichannel experiences between customers and agents. Kustomer is the core platform of some of the leading customer service brands like Ring, Glovo, and Glossier.

✨ The open CRM platform minimizes costs by acting as a single record of truth, managing, and contextualizing data to drive smarter processes that scale business.

Read more: 3 Player Support Tools Used by Top Gaming Companies

Live Chat Software

Live Chat customer support tools help businesses to communicate with website visitors through chat windows in real-time. Support teams can use this to answer questions and guide shoppers. Some of the reliable live chat software include:

Drift

Drift is loved for its ability to connect you with clients who are ready to make a purchase. It is characterized by fast-evolving tools to improve customers’ buying experience and generate quality leads.

✨ The Drift Revenue Acceleration Platform brings your go-to-market teams together to deliver personalized customer experiences that increase your revenue, shorten your sales cycles, and strengthen your brand.

Free and paid plans

Intercom

Intercom allows your team to build a stronger customer relationship through customized, messenger-based experiences. It features different language settings to accommodate all.

✨ Adopting a conversational, messenger-based approach helps each connection feel friendly, personal, and convenient – creating happy, loyal customers.

Freshchat

The messaging software is built to meet every business’ needs. It features reliable chatbots for timely responses, proactive campaigns, and numerous conversational channels, including Facebook messenger, line messenger, and Whatsapp.

✨ Delight customers with bots and AI that focus on intent, delight, and faster resolution.

Free and paid plans

 

LiveChat

LiveChat is a premium live chat and help desk software for business. Designed and built specifically for amazing customer service, used in 150 countries by over 27,000 companies.

✨ Show off your goods in elegant product cards and make more sales while chatting. Qualify leads with custom forms and AI chatbot automation.

tawk.to

Monitor and chat with the visitors on your website, mobile app, or from a free customizable page. Ranked #1 with a 98% customer satisfaction score, over 3.6 million people use tawk.to to interact with 1.6 billion visitors every month.

✨ It’s super easy to get started: Click. Copy. Paste. Chat.

✨ Free

Quality Assurance Software

Quality Management platforms (also called Quality Assurance (QA), Quality Control software) are crafted to help companies evaluate their customer service team’s performance. Customer service quality management software aims to improve customer satisfaction and workers’ engagement. Some of the best customer support software under this category include:

Klaus

Klaus measurably improves customer service quality by making internal feedback easy and systematic. Get actionable metrics with AI-powered features for team improvements and agent development. See trends over time and pinpoint your training strategies.  

✨ Klaus integrates seamlessly with most of the popular help desk solutions. Klaus’ browser extension allows reviewing conversations wherever they happen.

Read more: Call Center Quality Assurance: What, Why, and How?

Summatti

This quality assurance tool helps you save time and money by offering real-time insights and automatic quality control. It features an AI-powered dashboard to improve the performance of your customer support team.

✨ Save time & money by using our AI-powered dashboard to empower your customer support team, whether they’re on-site or remote.

StellaConnect

Stellaconnect features 1:1 tools that allow you to manage and organize feedback sessions with the customer support team. It also has customer feedback request forms for fast inquiries.

✨ Customer feedback, coaching, and QA are typically disconnected–save time and money by centralizing them in one platform.

Check out this Stella Connect alternative & comparison.

EvaluAgent

With this software, you can evaluate and coach your customer support team’s performance for improved productivity. The tool is cloud-based, thus eliminating the need for spreadsheets to produce reports based on customer-interactions scores.

✨ EvaluAgent works as an independent platform or integrates with your favorite systems. Natively, or via an open-API.

Check out this Evaluagent alternative & comparison.

Scorebuddy

Scorebuddy provides a fast and easy way to create limitless scorecard designs to help you access chats, emails, and calls. With this, you can seamlessly set quality assurance score rules and policies to evaluate your team’s performance and customer interactions.

✨ Scorebuddy is a call center quality assurance platform that allows monitoring and measuring service quality.

Check out this Scorebuddy alternative & comparison.

Playvox

Playvox is characterized by a range of features for seamless performance and increased productivity of your support team. You can go for the premium plan that comes with training features to motivate your team.

✨ Playvox integrates with multiple CRM and service software or can be used as standalone software.

Check out this Playvox alternative & comparison.

Kaizo

Kaizo helps to evaluate and improve your team’s performance with unified and actionable real-time insights, QA, and gamification.

✨ Kaizo focuses on gamification, so agents can focus on achieving their goals in a simplified way while pushing engagement among the teams digitally.

Check out this Kaizo alternative & comparison.

Knowledge Base Software

Knowledge base platforms are geared towards sharing and managing knowledge, to offer customers and customer support teams detailed information on your products or services. Some of the best customer service software for knowledge sharing are:

Intercom

Deliver help content to customers – and scale your support – with Intercom’s integrated knowledge base. Faster answers for customers, fewer questions for your team.

✨ With Messenger on every article, your customers can instantly start a conversation if they need more help.

HelpCrunch

HelpCrunch is an all-in-one customer service tool in its purest form. It offers live chat, ticketing, email marketing, pop-ups, and, of course, knowledge base functionality.

✨ What HelpCrunch has in terms of knowledge base functionality is a simple, sleek, modern tool designed to be as convenient as possible. Your customer support reps will be creating knowledge base articles in a WYSIWYG text editor.

Document360

This software is designed to create a well-organized knowledge base. It is characterized by a minimal and easy to use interface for creating a private and public knowledge base.

✨ It is probably the best knowledge base software for bigger teams as it has the best choice of collaboration features.

HelpJuice

Helpjuice’s easy-to-use and powerful knowledge base software is designed from the ground up to help you scale your customer support, and collaborate better with your team.

✨ The text editor by HelpJuice is rich in features and, what’s also important, feels modern and intuitive. It has all the necessary collaboration features so that multiple authors can work on one article and not bother each other.

ProProfs

The software is characterized by numerous tools, including live chat, brain games, training maker, and knowledge management. It provides a text editor that resembles Microsoft Word and editing tools for formatting and styling your knowledge base.

✨ ProProfs offers templates for all kinds of purposes like user manuals, wikis, technical documentation, or private knowledge bases.

Zendesk Guide

Zendesk Guide is a smart knowledge base for better self-service and empowered agents. It’s built to help you and your team continuously improve your content, keep it up to date, and serve it to customers before you can say ‘FAQ.’

✨ Customer service representatives will definitely enjoy the Google Docs importer offered by Zendesk.

✨ Free (included with Zendesk Support) and paid plans

Freshdesk

Identify and bridge the knowledge gap effortlessly. Help your customers find answers to their problems at their convenience.

✨ With SEO-friendly capabilities, your answers will show up at the top of the search results quickly.

✨ Free (included in the Freshdesk product) and paid plans

Atlassian Confluence

Confluence is your team workspace where knowledge and collaboration meet to achieve great things. Confluence comes equipped with best-practice templates so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Get started easily and maintain consistency across teams and projects.

✨ The name ‘Atlassian’ is familiar to every project manager or virtually anybody who works by agile methodology. They’re the company behind Jira, one of the most famous issue tracking software.

✨ Free and paid plans

Contact Center / Call Center Software

Managing phone calls can prove to be daunting for customer support teams, especially in large companies. It is both tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. This is where call center software comes in to do the hard task. Some of the customer service tools for this include:

Aircall

Aircall is the phone system for modern business. Simple to set up. Easy to use. Cloud-based call center software connected to your tools. Calls go better when all the right info is tied together in the cloud. Integrate Aircall with CRM systems, Helpdesk solutions, and other essential apps. Monitor individual and team metrics in real-time to start making measurable improvements.

✨ Don’t put progress on hold. Create new numbers, teams, and workflows on the fly whenever new business requirements arise.

Read more: 9 Aircall Integrations to Take Your Voice Support to The Next Level

Talkdesk

Customers expect more from contact centers today, and legacy systems can’t keep up. Talkdesk CX Cloud™ is a new kind of cloud contact center – an end-to-end solution on a single platform, delivering everything you need to make customer experience your competitive advantage while optimizing operational efficiency and reducing cost.

✨ Talkdesk has the highest Contact Center Operations score in the G2 Grid (positions vendors based on two important factors: market presence, and overall customer satisfaction using over 2,000 verified customer reviews).

✨ Pricing upon request

Learn more: Talkdesk and Klaus Integration for A-meow-zing Contact Center Quality

Nextiva

This call center is an easy-to-use interface that connects the support team with more callers within a short time. It also eliminates the need for many agents with amazing features such as automatic call routing and IVR.

✨ Nextiva’s mobile app keeps you connected when you’re away from your office phone — or replaces your desk phone entirely.

Dixa

A full-featured VoIP phone system that runs in your browser. Receive calls and make outbound calls with click-to-call. Never again worry about phone lines or maximum capacity.

✨ Prioritize certain queues over others to ensure the right calls get handled first during peak times. Route calls based on agents’ relative skill levels to make sure your customers always get the best help.

Five9

Five9 call center software enables agents to be more effective when handling customer interactions – deliver a better service experience or sell more.

✨ Engage your customers over their preferred contact channel – voice, email, chat, SMS, social, mobile, or video – and move them seamlessly between channels.

✨ Pricing upon request

✨ More resources on Contact Centers

Top Call Center QA Tools For Quality Monitoring

The One Call Center Quality Monitoring Scorecard You Need

Call Center Quality Assurance: Guidelines

Social Customer Service Platforms

Social media support is all about listening and responding to customers on social media channels. Responding to followers may be challenging, but not with the right software. Some of the tools you may incorporate include:

Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s all-in-one social management solution empowers customers to do more with their social media strategy. Better connect with audiences, streamline publishing workflows, collaborate in real-time, and turn social data into meaningful insights – at scale.

✨ Sprout Social is proud to be a leader in usability, customer support and satisfaction, ROI, and user adoption according to G2, the #1 independent software review site.

Salesforce Digital Engagement

Engage customers at the right time across any digital channel – mobile messaging, web chat, social networks, and more – to provide a seamless service experience.

✨ With an extra charge, you can use the Salesforce Einstein Bot Conversations, and help customers automatically, at scale, with AI-powered chatbots.

Front

Front drives business impact by scaling the natural conversations that create customers for life. More than 6,000 businesses are using Front today to cultivate personalized customer relationships at scale and transform their work into impact.

✨ Centralize customer communication on one platform to coordinate quickly and respond faster.

Conversocial

Conversocial is the Conversational Customer Experience Platform for messaging. Use Conversocial to care for your customers. Increase brand loyalty and customer satisfaction by resolving service-related conversations effortlessly.

✨ Tapping into the unique nature of messaging and voice channels, Conversocial powers conversational customer experiences for marketing, sales, and customer service with a seamless, integrated solution for AI-driven bots and human agent-based customer engagement.

✨ Price upon request

Sprinklr

Sprinklr’s Modern Care reduces the cost of customer support handling and resolution by applying smart, automated, and AI-driven technologies. Increase customer satisfaction

by improving collaboration with marketing and sales teams.

✨ Listen for care messages on modern social and messaging channels, and engage on both social and non-social posts on a single platform.

✨ Pricing upon request

Improve Your Customer Experience

Whether you’re a small startup or a large growing business, customer support management should be your top priority. You cannot go wrong by utilizing customer service software for efficiency and fast responses. Check out any of the mentioned tools to improve customer experience and your support team’s productivity.

Did we miss anything? Let us know at Quality Tribe – CX quality community for customer service professionals.