Best Customer Service Software: The Complete Toolset for 2023

With so many customer service solutions and tools on the market, selecting the best one can be challenging, especially for first-timers.

Worry no more. In this article, you will find a complete toolset for customer service agents: from comprehensive help desk software to quality assurance tools and knowledge management platforms.

Check out the top solutions for support teams and find the best customer service software for your needs.

The best help desk software

Help desk software keeps track of all your customer requests across various channels (be it social media, phone calls, emails, and live chats) making it convenient for your customer support team to address them in a timely manner. In other words, this type of customer service software enables you to manage customer interactions more effectively.

Some trustworthy help desk vendors include:

• Help Scout
• Intercom
• LiveAgent
• Front
• Zendesk Support
• Dixa
• Freshdesk
• Kustomer
• Gorgias

Help Scout

Help Scout is a customer service software designed to facilitate a smooth customer experience. Its user-friendly interface empowers businesses like yours to efficiently manage customer interactions — whether it’s through email, live chat, or phone calls. Its clutter-free features keep teams of any size on the same page. It’s trusted by 10,000+ customers in 140+ countries.

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

Intercom

With Intercom, you can build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences across the customer journey. Don’t just take our word for it —the world’s most successful companies use Intercom (and Intercom integrations) to deliver conversational customer experiences through chat, bots, and tailor-made messaging.

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

LiveAgent

LiveAgent is committed to delivering an all-in-one customer service solution that improves efficiency and customer satisfaction. It transforms each customer interaction into a ticket, allowing your customer support team to handle client inquiries effectively. These tickets are then organized and distributed to a shared inbox, allowing customer service teams to manage customer requests with ease.

✨ LiveAgent is one of the fastest customer service software solutions to implement and offers plenty of LiveAgent integrations to work with.

Front

Front is a powerful customer service software designed to improve team collaboration and improve customer support. It provides a shared inbox that enables your customer service team to work together efficiently, ensuring that no customer query or request goes unanswered. Front also offers advanced features such as assignment rules, automated workflows, and internal comments, allowing teams to streamline their processes and provide timely responses to customers.

✨ With its user-friendly interface and comprehensive set of tools, Front empowers your team to deliver exceptional customer service.

Zendesk Support

Zendesk is a renowned customer support solution that offers a suite of tools including ticketing, live chat, and call center solutions, along with a feature-rich knowledge base for self-service. Zendesk’s unified platform and multiple Zendesk integrations ensure all customer interactions across multiple channels are centralized, allowing your support team to respond more efficiently and maintain a consistent brand voice.

✨ Zendesk’s AI-powered automation features facilitate faster responses and 24/7 customer support.

Dixa

Dixa is a customer service tool designed to help businesses create personalized experiences for their customers across various channels. It integrates various customer service touchpoints, including phone, email, chat, and social media, into a single interface, so that your customer service agents can offer quicker, more effective responses.

✨ Dixa’s AI capabilities help route inquiries to the most suitable teams, thereby improving overall efficiency.

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service software that’s designed to facilitate excellent customer service for businesses of all sizes. It transforms incoming customer inquiries from various channels — including email, phone, web, chat, and social media — into manageable tickets. This allows you to streamline and unify your support operations, especially when you take advantage of Freshdesk integrations.

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

Kustomer

Kustomer is a comprehensive customer service software designed to enable businesses to deliver outstanding, personalized customer experiences. Operating on the principle of treating customers as people and not tickets, Kustomer provides a unified view of customer interactions across multiple channels in one place, which allows for more effective communication and quicker resolution.

✨ Kustomer’s AI capabilities streamline and automate common workflows, making it easier for customer service teams to manage high volumes of inquiries.

Gorgias

Gorgias is a comprehensive customer service platform designed specifically for e-commerce businesses. Known for its ability to centralize all interactions and customer data, it simplifies customer support management, allowing your team to deliver more personalized and efficient service. The platform integrates seamlessly with e-comm giants such as Shopify, Magento/Adobe Commerce, and BigCommerce (all of which offer headless commerce capabilities).

✨ Gorgias’ robust automation features streamline repetitive tasks, saving time and enabling support teams to focus more on customer engagement and satisfaction.

Picking the right customer service software for your needs

Choosing customer service software that’s tailored to your business can greatly enhance your customer support quality. Here are a few important factors to consider during the selection process:

1. Business needs: The first step in choosing a help desk software is to understand your organization’s specific needs. Evaluate the size of your team, the nature of your business, the volume of customer inquiries, and your growth projections. The features you require will depend heavily on these factors.
2. Available integrations: Choose software that can seamlessly integrate with other customer service tools you’re going to use — or you already do. This will ensure smooth data sharing and enable better customer service.
3. Ticket management: Look for a system that can efficiently categorize, assign, and prioritize tickets. Automated routing, tagging, and grouping of tickets can help streamline your support process.
4. Multi-channel support: Today’s customers reach out through various channels — including email, phone, chat, and social media. Choose software that can unify all these channels into one platform for a consolidated view of all customer interactions, especially if you want to offer omnichannel support.
5. Reporting and analytics: Good help desk software should provide comprehensive reporting and analytics to help you monitor performance, identify trends, spot issues, and make informed decisions.
6. Scalability: As your business grows, your help desk software should be able to scale with you. Check if the software can handle increasing ticket volumes, users, and features you may need in the future.
7. Security: Ensure the software adheres to high-security standards to protect your customers’ data.
8. Pricing: Finally, consider your budget. Ensure the software’s cost aligns with its features and your requirements.

Ultimately, the best customer servicee software is one that you and your team enjoy using regularly, and this may vary among different support teams.

Understand what it is that makes some tools work for people in your customer support team. There’ll always be some amount of compromising between different preferences because these are all subjective. If you pick something that meets the needs of the largest number of people, then adoption will happen organically.

Nouran Smogluk

Director, User & Partner Success, komoot

An effective way to determine this is by signing up for free trials of different tools, experiencing them firsthand, and involving the agents who’ll be using the software most frequently in the decision-making process. Start exploring these tools today to find the perfect fit for your customer service team!

The best 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 such tools to answer questions and guide customers — both existing and potential ones. Some of the reliable live chat customer service tools include:

• Drift
• Intercom
• HelpCrunch
• Freshchat
• LiveChat
• tawk.to

Drift

With its array of customer-centric tools, Drift strives to improve the customer’s buying experience. It leverages advanced technologies, such as AI-driven chatbots, allowing your customer service agents to provide swift responses to customer requests, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

✨ Drift offers self-service deflection through knowledge base integrations and AI-powered customer service chatbots.

Intercom

Once again, Intercom raises to the top of the list. This customer support software makes it easy for your team to form stronger connections with customers by providing personalized, chat-based experiences. It even supports different languages to cater to a wide range of customers.

✨ Intercom Fin, an AI bot powered by OpenAI, solves complex problems and provides safer, more accurate answers than any other AI bot on the market.

HelpCrunch

HelpCrunch is a customer service platform that builds seamless business-client relationships. With a multichannel live chat as its hallmark feature, you can drive sales, provide uninterrupted support, and engage website visitors proactively. Thanks to a shared inbox, messages from chat, email, and social media trickle down to one place chronologically.

✨ HelpCrunch also provides a codeless chatbot for self-service, an integrated knowledge base, a popup builder, and email marketing specs. 

Freshchat

Freshchat is a messaging tool created to suit the needs of all kinds of businesses. It comes with smart chatbots that can respond quickly, carry out proactive campaigns, and interact across various messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.

✨ The platform’s bots and AI focus on understanding customer intentions, providing delightful interactions, and resolving issues faster.

LiveChat

LiveChat is a top-tier live chat and help desk tool specifically built for providing excellent customer service. It’s a tool of choice for over 27,000 companies in 150 countries.

✨ The platform lets you display your products in attractive product cards, helping you to sell more while interacting with customers. It also helps identify potential customers using custom forms and AI-powered chatbot automation.

tawk.to

tawk.to might be less advanced than the rest, but it’s free customer service software that facilitates customer interactions. Recognized for its user-friendly interface and easy setup, tawk.to helps you monitor and chat with website visitors, respond to support tickets, organize contacts, and create a help center to empower customers to help themselves.

✨ Its most appealing feature is its cost-effectiveness. It’s completely free to use, making it a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes seeking to enhance their customer communication strategies.

The best quality assurance software

Quality assurance solutions (also called Quality Assurance, QA, or Quality Control software) are crafted to help companies evaluate their customer service team’s performance. Some of the best customer support software under this category include:

• Klaus
• EvaluAgent
• Scorebuddy
• Playvox
• MaestroQA

Klaus

Klaus is a quality management solution that helps companies drive revenue through excellent customer service. With Klaus, you can identify gaps in your customer experience before they become a problem, and quickly fix whatever isn’t working. It provides unmatched visibility into what shapes your support quality.

EvaluAgent

EvaluAgent provides meaningful insights, feedback, and metrics that empower customer service teams to improve support quality. Its suite of tools offers functionalities for tracking agent performance, providing your agents with constructive feedback, and fostering a positive, rewarding work environment.

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

Scorebuddy

Scorebuddy provides a fast and easy way to create multiple QA scorecards and help you review chats, emails, and calls. These scorecards, combined with the platform’s insightful analytics, provide a detailed understanding of your team’s performance and customer satisfaction levels.

✨ Scorebuddy’s versatility ensures that it can be tailored to fit the unique needs of any business.

Playvox

Playvox facilitates seamless monitoring, evaluation, and improvement of your agent interactions across various customer service channels. Its platform provides a range of features for quality assurance, performance management, coaching, learning, and agent motivation — all geared toward creating a more productive and engaged workforce.

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

MaestroQA

MaestroQA is an advanced quality assurance platform built to ensure consistency and quality across all customer interactions, regardless of the channel used. MaestroQA accomplishes this through a comprehensive suite of tools that enable you to monitor and grade customer service performance, identify areas for improvement, and provide targeted coaching.

✨ The platform also generates actionable insights through robust analytics, empowering you to make data-driven decisions that create loyal customers.

Customer service QA solutions vs spreadsheets

Every support team dedicated to maintaining a high level of quality will inevitably reach a point where it becomes necessary to evaluate the quality of their customer interactions through internal conversation reviews. As you scale up, managing quality becomes more challenging. It’s essential to determine whether your agents are providing consistent customer experiences across all communication channels.

Thus, the question isn’t about whether to conduct conversation reviews, but rather how to execute them. Teams must decide between using spreadsheets for reviews or investing in a specialized quality assurance tool for customer service.

Spreadsheets are often sufficient for small teams handling a lower volume of customer conversations, provided that maintaining the document doesn’t consume the majority of the time allocated for internal feedback.

However, as the team and conversation volume expand, manual copy-pasting and reporting can become a significant bottleneck in your customer service QA process. For larger or growing teams, managing data can take up more than 70% of review time, which is why they frequently choose dedicated QA tools like the ones mentioned above.

Spreadsheets might work for a small (<10 support agents) team, but the moment your team grows beyond that I would absolutely recommend switching to a dedicated tool. For one, you’ll not have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to calculations and data visualization. It’ll also help with just keeping track of things and if the tool is AI-based, it will also reduce the workload for your CSQA Specialist.

Ines van Dijk

Quality in Support

If you’re not sure which solution is the best one for your needs, take a look at a quick customer service QA software comparison:

The best knowledge base software

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

• Intercom
• Document360
• HelpJuice
• ProProfs
• Zendesk Guide

Intercom

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Intercom’s powerful customer service software arms your customers with immediate access to information and answers, empowering them to solve many of their own customer queries swiftly and independently. As a result, your support team benefits from a reduction in the number of incoming inquiries, freeing up their time to focus on more complex issues that require their expertise.

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

Document360

Tailored specifically to create a structured help center, Document360 is a knowledge base software that stands out with its simplistic yet functional interface. It offers a streamlined method for managing both internal company knowledge and external knowledge bases.

✨ Given its vast range of collaborative features, it has a strong appeal for larger support teams, positioning it as a top choice among knowledge base software solutions.

HelpJuice

HelpJuice’s knowledge base software is a robust and user-friendly tool designed to support the scalability of your customer support and promote effective team collaboration. Its modern and intuitive text editor comes packed with a rich set of features.

✨ HelpJuice has all the necessary collaboration features so that multiple authors can work on one knowledge base article and not bother each other.

ProProfs

ProProfs is a versatile software packed with various tools such as live chat, brain games, a training creator, and knowledge base management functionalities. Its text editor, similar to Microsoft Word, and editing tools allow for a customized appearance of your knowledge base.

✨ ProProfs offers a variety of templates suitable for a range of uses, such as user manuals, wikis, technical documentation, or internal knowledge base software.

Zendesk Guide

Not surprisingly, Zendesk Guide is a smart knowledge base engineered to enhance and distribute self-service content while boosting agent efficiency. It’s designed to assist your customer service team in continually refining content, ensuring its relevance, and delivering it to customers in a prompt manner.

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

Picking the right knowledge base software for your needs

When looking for the right software solution, consider the following:

• Your needs: Different businesses have different needs. A smaller startup might prioritize cost and usability, while a larger enterprise might need feature-rich software with robust collaboration and integration capabilities. Understand what you require from the customer service software, and align those needs with your budget and business strategy.
• Ease of use: The software should be user-friendly, with an intuitive interface for both your customer service team and your customers. If the software is too complex to use, it can slow down your team and frustrate your customers.
• Customization: The ability to customize the look and feel of your knowledge base to match your brand’s image is important. It should offer customization options for colors, logos, layouts, and more.
• Search capabilities: The software should offer advanced search functionality to help users quickly and easily find what they are looking for. Features like predictive text, filtering, and tagging can be beneficial.
• Integration: Look for a knowledge base software that integrates seamlessly with your existing customer support tools like live chat, ticketing system, and CRM. This will allow your support team to have all necessary customer information in one place.
• Collaboration features: If you have a large team, features that allow multiple authors to collaborate on a single article, track changes, and manage versions can be beneficial.
• Scalability: As your business grows, your knowledge base software should be able to grow with it. Consider if the software can handle a higher volume of articles and users and if it offers additional features that you might need in the future.
• Analytics: Having in-depth analytics can help you understand how your customers are interacting with your knowledge base. This can help you identify popular articles, common customer issues, and areas that need improvement.
• Customer support: Finally, consider the software vendor’s customer support. You may need help setting up your knowledge base, or you might run into issues down the line. Good customer support can make this process smoother.

Remember, the best way to make a final decision is to take advantage of the free trials or demos that most vendors offer. This will give you a firsthand experience of the software’s features and usability, ensuring it’s the right fit for your business.

The best call center software

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

• Aircall
• Talkdesk
• Nextiva
• Five9
• CallHippo

Aircall

Aircall‘s intuitive interface and easy setup make it an excellent choice for businesses looking to enhance their communication capabilities without the need for complex installations or expensive hardware. Its integrations with popular CRM, Helpdesk, and other productivity tools ensure that all your customer interaction data is centrally available, fostering more personalized and effective communication.

✨ Aircall provides multiple advanced features like call recording, interactive voice response (IVR), international numbers, and real-time analytics, among others.

Talkdesk

Talkdesk offers a wide range of features such as intelligent routing, voice analytics, automation, and integrations with numerous CRM systems. Through its customer-centric approach and robust technology, Talkdesk is committed to transforming the contact center landscape, enhancing customer satisfaction, and driving business success.

✨ Its AI-driven functionalities provide actionable insights that help you improve customer interactions and operational efficiency.

Nextiva

Nextiva is a provider of cloud-based business communication solutions, designed to improve collaboration and customer engagement. It offers a broad spectrum of services, including business phone systems, contact center solutions, and team collaboration tools. Nextiva’s suite also integrates seamlessly with popular business applications, helping you streamline support operations and improve agent productivity.

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

Five9

Five9 offers a comprehensive suite of solutions that includes inbound, outbound, and blended contact center operations, along with capabilities for workforce management, reporting, analytics, and customer relationship management integrations. Its technology also ensures high reliability, security, and scalability, making it a favored choice for businesses of all sizes across a multitude of industries.

✨ Five9 uses AI to enhance the customer experience and agent productivity.

CallHippo

CallHippo is a cutting-edge VoIP service provider that offers cloud-based telephony solutions to businesses of all sizes around the globe. It’s designed to equip you with international phone numbers from over 50 countries so that you can establish a local presence wherever you operate. CallHippo’s solutions are also marked by their ease of setup and user-friendly interface, making them an excellent choice for any business looking to streamline communication processes.

✨ Key features include call forwarding, call recording, call analytics, and auto-dialing.

Choosing the best customer service software for phone support

There are plenty more phone support solutions. When choosing the best one for your team, make sure to identify their needs first. For instance, a small business might need basic call routing features, while a large enterprise may require advanced capabilities like interactive voice response (IVR) or artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

A few more things to consider:

• Look for software that provides robust reporting and analytics capabilities. Data-driven insights can help you understand your customer behavior, agent performance, and identify areas for improvement.
• Ensure the software adheres to industry-standard security measures to protect sensitive customer data. It should also comply with regulatory standards relevant to your industry.
• Finally, consider the pricing structure. The software should offer value for money, with a balance between cost and features. Look for solutions that offer flexible plans to accommodate your growth without significant disruptions or cost increases.

Choosing the best customer service software is a critical decision for any business, as it directly impacts customer service quality and overall operational efficiency.

It’s high time to invest in (the best) customer service software

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 — Klaus’ community for customer service professionals.

Originally published in January 2023; last updated in June 2023.