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4 tech tools to help keep your customer service on track

@chad-sapieha
Technology - Aug. 24, 2017

4 tech tools to help keep your customer service on track

From help-desk software to a must-listen podcast, technology can help boost customer satisfaction

These days, technology allows small businesses to deliver more-efficient customer service and support via services such as live chat and mobile alerts, while simultaneously gathering important data that can be used to grow relationships and create sales possibilities.

Here are four technology-based tools to check out.

Freshdesk

One of the most popular help-desk suites around, Freshdesk is a deep, full-featured application that can easily scale from tiny teams of just one or two people all the way up to massive enterprise environments. It provides everything you'd expect from modern help-desk software, from robust ticket-management capabilities to automated systems that can help your support staff find solutions almost instantly. It can even send alerts from key customers when you're away from your desk – a potentially critical feature for small-business owners who do much of the company's customer service themselves. You'll also receive automatically generated reports that can help you understand how both individuals and groups within your support team are performing.

Gong

This Israel-based startup may very well represent the future of customer-relationship management. Its software leverages the power of artificial intelligence to help your team understand what's working and what isn't during customer calls. It works by automatically joining conference calls to record and transcribe everything that's said. The conversation is then parsed by Gong's proprietary analytics engine, which identifies and highlights both effective and ineffective tactics. It's all automated and requires virtually no human effort beyond reviewing and learning from Gong's analysis. Staff can examine their own results, while management can see a snapshot of everyone's calls, providing them a big-picture perspective on their team's sales and service.

Support Ops

If you're new to providing customer support, or just want to hone your existing support skills, this podcast is essential. Hosted by support veterans who really know their stuff, the podcast features experts discussing such topics as: how quickly you ought to respond to customer emails; how to create effective team-communication practices; and how to ensure customer-account security. Even their more philosophical episodes – which dig into subjects such as the type of language companies choose to use and what it says about them – can prove surprisingly enlightening. Don't think you have time to listen? You can always start off by reading the 10-point customer-service manifesto on the organization's site, which provides some very valuable tips.

SurveyMonkey

Sometimes, the only people who really understand what you're doing right and wrong when it comes to customer service are the customers themselves. But you can't always rely on them to volunteer what they know. A good way of coaxing it out is to prepare a short survey they can complete after they've interacted with your support or sales staff. There are plenty of ways to do this, but you'll be hard-pressed to find a tool that's simpler or more effective than SurveyMonkey. It provides easy-to-understand templates for questions with multiple-choice answer and rating scales, letting you quickly create exactly the kind of survey you need. It takes just minutes to author a questionnaire, and you can publish it in a variety of ways – through social media, on your website or in a direct email to a customer.