Great customer experience helps to promote customer loyalty, retention, and business growth. This encompasses how the customer feels about a business throughout the sales cycle. Companies must be ready to provide quality support to their customers at all times. However, this often requires investing in competent sales agents as well as customer experience software. In this article, we’ll discuss why your business needs customer experience software.
What is customer experience software?
Customer experience software is an application that helps to track and manage customer interactions. It allows access to multiple support channels and customer data on the platform. It can automate several mundane tasks and provide the tools necessary for good customer support.
The software also makes it easier for managers and team leaders to evaluate agent performance. There’s usually a reporting dashboard that allows you to measure the KPIs, and analyze customer feedback. Such customer service insights are crucial to providing much-improved support.
Why investing in the customer experience is worth it
Good customer service helps to maintain a customer base and improve your brand image. Many customers consider customer service experience before deciding to stay loyal to a brand. They are more likely to make repeat purchases as well as refer friends and family to the brand.
But customer experience expectations are changing, and many businesses are struggling to meet them. According to Accenture, 64% of customers wish companies would respond faster to meet their changing needs while 88% of executives think their customers are changing faster than their business can keep up.
Investing in customer experience means equipping your agents with software tools and resources. This helps to streamline tasks, increase agent productivity, and ensure faster response times. According to the stats, 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue.
How can smart and intuitive CX software benefit companies?
There are numerous benefits of using modern customer experience software for your business. They often include:
- Provide support over any channel
There are multiple support channels available such as email, live chat, phone calls, or social media platforms. You can receive support requests and reply to customers across various channels without leaving the platform.
- Personalize the conversations.
A smart customer experience software allows you to view past interactions with a customer and their information. You can learn about each customer’s preferences and agents can pick up from where the conversation ended.
- Provide self-service options.
Many customers don’t want to wait minutes for an agent to respond to their request. They would like real-time support so it’s a good idea to provide self-service options such as AI chatbots, knowledgebase, FAQs, and community forums.
What type of features should you look for in CX software?
There are some important features that a good customer experience needs to have. They include:
- Omnichannel interface
It allows you to connect all communication channels to the platform. You can access and respond to requests directly. This makes it easier for agents to reply to customers faster.
- Ticketing system
A ticketing system would convert all incoming tickets into requests. It’s a valuable feature that can automatically track, prioritize, and route tickets to available agents.
- Integrations for third-party tools
Integrating with other business apps allows you to access customer information on the platform. You can easily find the cause of the problem and resolve most issues quickly.
- Self-service tools
More customers want to find solutions by themselves. You can provide AI chatbots and help center articles to assist them. This helps to reduce the number of support tickets.
- Reporting and data insights
A CX software should have a reporting and analytics feature. This helps to collect your customer service data as well as analyze them for better decision-making.
How to choose the right customer experience software for your business?
The right customer experience software is one that offers important features and automation capabilities. There are two popular CX software brands out there – Zendesk vs Freshdesk. Let’s proceed to compare both below:
- Zendesk uses unified reporting to consolidate data from all channels in place. But Freshdesk requires you to export and combine data manually.
- Zendesk offers analytics tools such as reports and dashboards and custom metrics but Freshdesk offers fewer reports and no custom metrics.
- Freshdesk has a couple of integrations and addons but Zendesk provides a library of customizable and easy-to-setup integrations with popular tools
- Zendesk pricing starts at $19 per agent/month but Freshdesk starts at $15 per agent/month. Although Zendesk is higher priced, the return on investment will be well worth it.
- Zendesk can support businesses of any size and can grow with your company but Freshdesk can only scale for teams of up to 15 agents.
Conclusion
Customer experience software is crucial to meeting the ever-changing needs of customers. The most popular and widely used platforms include Zendesk and Freshdesk. If you have to choose, consider the reporting and analytics, integrations, pricing, and scalability. You should prioritize those unique capabilities that are best for your business.
