Looking for a customer service solution that’s suitable for your business can be a real chore. All of your available options can seem overwhelming when you’re beginning from scratch.
90% of Americans consider a company’s customer service reputation before deciding to do business with them. Your customer service agents can only do so much—they require a comprehensive suite of customer service tools to keep up with modern demands.
In this article, I will outline the best customer service software on the market today and outline some noteworthy features and primary use cases. Hopefully, that will help you make your decision as you pick the best customer support software for you.
The Best Customer Service Software List
Here’s a shortlist of the best customer service softwares for your business:
Other Types Of Customer Service Software
There are a few other articles summarizing the best customer service software for different use cases. Find more specific lists here, or continue reading for the overall best.
- Customer Service Automation Software
- Customer Service Email Management Software
- Customer Service Chat Software For Small Business
- Customer Service Tracking Software
- Free Customer Service Software
- Customer Service Ticketing Software
Customer Service Software for Business: Comparison Criteria
What do I look for when I select the best customer service business software? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): The UI should support ease-of-use with key functions being straightforward and simple to find. Navigation should not be a chore; finding customer data, query logs, and CX insights must be intuitive.
- Usability: The best customer service software will facilitate easy onboarding and even some built-in training prompts and feature wizards. The tool’s user support team should also be responsive, easy to access, and thorough.
- Integrations: Customer service solutions must speak to your company tech stack. For example: Does it connect natively with WhatsApp and other social media platforms, GSuite, Slack, Salesforce, your CRM and ERP systems, and so on?
- Value for $: The average customer service software ranges in price anywhere from $15-300/agent/month. What I’m looking for is: do the features fit the cost? Are the pricing plans scalable? And, is there a freemium or free trial available?
Customer Service Business Software Key Features
- Self-service portal: Customers should be able to help themselves to some degree for easy queries.
- Social media integration: You should be able to connect to social media to handle customer complaints and requests where they are the loudest and most harmful.
- Automation: Simple, administrative tasks like assigning tickets or marking a date/status can be automated to speed up the workflow.
- Knowledge Base: Being able to compile, update, and draw from a single source of truth database is important for customer and agent queries.
- Ticketing management: The system should be able to manage incoming help tickets and populate them (manually or automatically) with contextual, detailed data.
- Customer relationship management: A CRM database is important to keep track of customer information, including past interactions, so conversations feel personalized.
- Omnichannel communication: The tool should be able to reach your customers wherever they are—your website, email, social media, SMS, and so on.
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Overviews Of The 10 Best Customer Service Softwares for Your Business
Here’s a brief description of the customer service softwares for business that I qualify to be the best of the best. I’ve included best use cases, feature descriptions, pricing information, and even screenshots to show off the UX where possible.
1. Custify – Best for SaaS companies
Custify is a customer success software designed primarily for SaaS businesses.
It focuses on all the aspects of consumer involvement with your business including customer lifecycles, product adoption, and upsell opportunities. Custify can automate basic customer service actions, like welcome emails, low engagement jump-starts, and personalized renewal processes.
Custify assigns health scores to each client, which identifies potentials for churn or profit and flags your team to intervene with context-specific messaging where appropriate. Scheduled emails can be sent to sales, management, and stakeholders to keep them informed about company performance. Basic customer service solutions can be handled by their entry-level plan but upgrading will unlock project management features and workflow automations that your team may find useful.
Custify can be integrated with Slack, email, SMS, analytics solutions, and your CRM. You can also use Custify’s native API to connect with more tools.
Custify starts from $199/month and offers a free trial and a free demo.
2. TeamSupport – Best for B2B companies
TeamSupport is customer support software meant for B2B companies in that it excels at lower volume, high complexity customer support items. TeamSupport focuses on customer and ticket management but also fosters collaboration using “Water Cooler”, their internal messaging app and social network system.
TeamSupport generates a customer distress index (CDI) for each client based on how many tickets they have and their average resolution time. This tool can assess which clients might be getting frustrated, then prompting a customer service agent to intervene. Each client has a detailed profile that shares real-time updates across your whole team. The customer and contact database is particularly useful for onboarding new agents who aren’t familiar with your customer base yet.
TeamSupport integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Salesforce CRM, and other corporate applications.
TeamSupport costs from $50/user/month and offers a 14-day free trial.
3. AzureDesk – Best helpdesk software for larger companies
AzureDesk is a robust ticket management system that can be implemented to support your agents by collecting and organizing the data they need to assist customers in a bind. You can use customizable tags for quick ticket sorting by status, type, or priority. The private notes field is a flexible space where your team can add any relevant details that don’t fit anywhere else.
AzureDesk hosts a self-populated knowledge base for your agents and customers to lean on for common questions and issues like “I need a password reset” or “How long does standard shipping take?” The tool’s dynamic search function can even predict customer inquiries before they are fully typed.
Emails sent to your help desk are automatically turned into tickets so nothing falls through the cracks. All ticket details are compiled into a database that can then be parsed by their analytics system for actionable insight and reports.
AzureDesk can be integrated with Slack, Asana, JIRA, your email platform, and other similar apps.
AzureDesk starts at $33/user/month and comes with a 14-day free trial.
4. Freshdesk – Best for integrations
Freshdesk is a natively omnichannel customer service software that can scale up or down by integrating with a suite of specialized first-party products for sales, marketing, HR, and IT. Freshdesk’s basic plan comes with customer health scoring, proactive account alerts, goal and task management, and email campaigns.
Freshdesk’s goal management module is particularly handy, as not every customer service software has these types of project management capabilities. With it, you can tie big picture goals to detailed metrics; assign tasks with due dates, priority status, and an owner; build reusable templates for common goals and tasks; and track and measure your progress.
Freshdesk integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Pipedrive, Oracle Netsuite, Insightly, Copper, Zoho CRM, Close, Zendesk, TeamSupport, Help Scout, Jira Service Desk, Zoho Desk, Chargebee, Recurly, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks Online, Xero, Intercom, Google Calendar, Azure, and a growing list of other useful apps.
Freshdesk’s paid plan starts at $15/agent/month and a 21-day free trial is available should you be interested.
5. Zoho CRM – Best enterprise CRM
Zoho CRM is an omnichannel platform used by over 250,000 businesses in 180 countries, including the likes of Amazon, Suzuki, and Bose. Their built-in solution called Canvas lets you hyper-customize the user interface of your CRM system—all code free. With Zoho, you can touch base with customers anywhere: telephone, email, live chat, and social media.
Zoho CRM keeps you on the ball by pinging your agents when a customer interacts with your brand across any of the connected channels. It also stored detailed communication data so that you can pull reports and figure out when and where is the best time to reach your audience. Additionally, you can leverage workflow automations using IF/THEN commands to prepopulate a software response.
Being part of the Zoho ecosystem allows you to connect to several of Zoho’s own services such as Zoho Books, Zoho Projects, and Zoho’s finance suite. The new Zoho marketplace allows 3rd party integrations as well, like Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, Zapier, Zendesk, and ServiceNow. Integrations via Zapier and Zoho Flow are also supported.
Zoho CRM has a free package that can accommodate up to 3 users. Paid plans cost from $12/user/month and come with a 15-day free trial.
6. Keap CRM – Best for entrepreneurs
Keap CRM is a sales and marketing customer support software that helps you capture leads, manage invoices, and compile client data. They offer free migrations from ActiveCampaign, AWeber, ConstantContact, HubSpot, MailChimp, and Ontraport if you are looking to switch over. Features include marketing automation, a sales pipeline, a CRM database, payment collection, reporting and analytics, appointment tracking, and email campaigns.
Keap CRM is a customer support tool and CRM specifically designed for entrepreneurs. Their platform helps you build a personalized playbook to hone your goals and provides access to a community of like-minded business owners, including coaching opportunities. They host an engaged user community both on their website forum and via their Facebook group.
Keap CRM integrates with over 2500 applications, some natively and others using a paid account with Zapier.
Keap CRM starts from $79/month for one user and a 14-day free trial is available.
7. Zendesk – Best for startups
Zendesk is a funky, modern CRM solution that makes up words like “humblident” (humble + confident) and boasts offices in Dublin, San Francisco, London, Copenhagen, and Melbourne, to name a few. It combined the colorful, fun attitude that contemporary startups love with a good product for a more-than-fair price.
Standout features of Zendesk include a robust ticketing system, omnichannel messaging and support, a help center, easy to use workflow automations, an AI-powered chatbot, out-of-the-box reporting and analytics, and over 1,000 prebilt apps and integrations. They also have a cheaper, fundamentals plan that covers only ticketing, business rules, interaction history, reporting, and dashboards.
Zendesk integrates with Salesforce, JIRA, Slack, Trello, JIRA, Zoom, Dropbox, Clubhouse, Asana, monday.com, Box, Nicereply, Harvestr, Shopify, Mailchimp, and dozens of other options.
Zendesk starts at $19/user/month and offers a 30-day free trial. Qualifying early-stage startups get Zendesk free for 6 months.
8. Kustomer – Best no-code AI chatbot
Kustomer is a CRM and customer service platform used by Abercrombie and Fitch Co., Ring, Stella & Dot, Glossier, and Hopper. Like most solutions on this list, they can tap into your customer base wherever they are online or offline: email, phone, chat, social and messaging apps. They prioritize customer self-service and support multiple different written languages.
Kustomer offers tons of AI-powered solutions for CRM and customer service, including automated triage and routing, smart self-service chatbots, and personalized engagement suggestions. Their customizable chatbot is a standout feature, going so far as to host an image carousel of a customer’s past interactions to pull from and display at will.
Kustomer can be integrated with Shopify, Slack, Gmail, Twitter and other social media/messaging and commerce apps.
Kustomer starts at $89/user/month and offers a free demo,
9. HappyFox – Best customizable customer portal
HappyFox is an all-in-one ticketing support software that pulls all incoming requests from any source (email, chat, phone, and social) into one dynamic dashboard. They have the ability to outsource complex and redundant workflows to a powerful smart rules engine, meaning that even higher-difficulty queries can be handled without manual intervention.
HappyFox also features task management tools, help desk reporting, a flexible knowledge base/FAQ solution, asset management, and a no-code customer support portal builder. This customizable customer portal can be SEO optimized and made mobile friendly, all with on-brand visuals and messaging.
Happyfox can be integrated with Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Slack and other collaboration apps.
Pricing for all bundles is available on request, along with a demo.
10. Kayako – Best for SMBs
Kayako is a customer service platform that offers customer service in multiple languages across live chat, email, Facebook, and Twitter. Over 131,000 agents currently use Kayako, including those from Sega, MTV, FedEx, General Electric Company, and Warner Brothers. Kayako focuses on cross-departmental collaboration, which is something small and medium businesses (SMBs) are better at using to the fullest. Large enterprises tend to be more siloed.
With Kayako, customer questions can be viewed by all agents so that a collaborative solution can be found quickly, leveraging the experiences of the company as a whole. Then, the dedicated agent can deliver a quick, personalized response to the customer on whatever platform they prefer. Your internal “knowledge base” then becomes your whole company and your different departmental teams, siloes be darned.
Kayako can be integrated with Salesforce, Slack, Shopify and other similar applications.
Kayako starts at $15/user/month and a 14-day free trial is available.
Other Customer Service Software for Business options
Here’s a few more that didn’t make the top list.
- Hubspot Service Hub – Best internal customer support software
- Moxtra – Best customer portal
- Sprinklr – Most extensive unified team support software
- Sysaid – Best cloud customer solution
- LiveChat – Best real-time support solution
- LiveAgent – Best technical live support software
- Gladly – Best all-in-one customer service solution
- LiveHelpNow – Most economical support solution
- Quiq Messaging – Best SMS/text messaging customer solution
- Synthetix – Most accessible live help desk software
- Wix Answers – Best support article solution
- FAQ Bot – Best 24/7 fully-AI customer solution
- Vivantio – Best SaaS customer management solution
- Supportbench – Best analytical customer tool
- Gorgias – Best customer helpdesk for Shopify
- Ada – Best personalized AI customer solution
- HelpCrunch – Best customer communication software for sales/support
- Avochato – Best mobile API customer solution
- Front – Best collaborative customer support software
- RenewiftRMA – Best RMA management solution
- Bold360 – Best AI integrated customer engagement solution
- JIRA Service Management – Best fully-customizable support desk management software
Can you get customer service software free?
Freshdesk and Zoho CRM are examples of customer service software that have free plans. However, both are limited in how many team members you can add before choosing a premium bundle.
For more options, check out our article on free customer service software.
What Do You Think About These Customer Service Softwares For Your Business?
With that, we’ve taken a good look at the top picks for customer service software for your business. I hope you have a grasp on what makes for good customer service software. By making things easier for your team in terms of automatic systems, and tracking databases; you save valuable time that you can share with clients.
The longer you spend with them the more you get out of your business. Opportunities, profits, sales, relationships will all come through, giving reassurance to you and your colleagues that you are achieving what you can.
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Related Read: Pros And Cons Of Customer Service Automation
