7 Tools to Provide Impeccable Customer Support in Times of the COVID-19 Outbreak
As the coronavirus (covid-19) pandemic is raging all over the world, a huge number of businesses have ceased all operations to prevent the further spread of the virus. People are staying in, most of them working from home.
If you generally rely on online sales, the coronavirus crisis may not affect you that much. You can still sell to your customers, as long as you can safely deliver the products.
But even if you rely only on in-person sales, you can still provide seamless customer support during this difficult time. Chances are your customers are already contacting you non-stop, making it quite challenging to deal with all the emails, calls, support tickets, and social media messages.
How can you provide them with excellent support? With all the right tools in place, of course.
Here are the top tools you should utilize to help both your customers and your team push through COVID-19 just a little bit easier.
Creatio
Managing your sales, marketing, and customer service is now more challenging than ever. Fortunately, you can accelerate all three with Creatio.
Creatio (formerly bpm’ online) is a unified CRM system that brings together marketing, sales, and service, helping you streamline every customer’s journey.
It comes with a holistic multichannel marketing solution that you can use to generate, qualify, and nurture leads, before forwarding them to your sales department when they are ready to make a purchase.
With Marketing Creatio, you can personalize every customer interaction and automate all your efforts, including tracking your leads and sending bulk emails. You can set up trigger email campaigns, segment your leads, track the behavior of your website visitors, and even manage events.
Once you send your leads over to sales, your sales team will have a clear view of the entire customer journey. They’ll be able to seamlessly create campaigns and manage leads, opportunities, orders, invoices, and customer service, all on a single platform.
Sales Creatio also allows you to manage your field force and forecast your sales. It also lets you manage your contracts, products, knowledge base, and internal and external projects. You can automate your document flow, too, seamlessly managing your entire document database.
The best part about this cloud-based CRM system bundle is that it ties everything nicely with an easy-to-use Customer Center. It allows you to manage all customer communications from email, live chat, phone, social media, and your customer portal. It’s an ideal tool for every business looking for innovative solutions for full-cycle service management.
But there’s more to Service Creatio than just its Customer Center. It also comes with a Service Enterprise, where you can automate and manage your internal business processes and keep track of omnichannel communications. You can also track all requests, problems, changes, and planned and implemented releases in the system.
Service Creatio is currently free for all businesses fighting against COVID-19.
ProProfs Help Desk Software
ProProfs Help Desk Software is a cloud-based solution combining a ticketing system and customer support.
It lets you organize all your customer requests in one place, and share them with sales and other relevant departments so that everyone has a complete view of tickets and responses. You can also prioritize tickets to resolve the most critical issues first.
You can create a self-service help center where your customers can find answers to FAQs 24/7, which will significantly reduce your tickets.
The software also comes with an integrated live chat that records all interactions, so you can easily maintain personalized support.
ProProfs Help Desk has an array of solutions, each with a set of very useful features for better collaboration and impeccable customer support.
Acquire
Acquire is a customer service platform for providing unified customer support, no matter which channel your customers reach out from.
The software automatically logs each interaction in the Acquire Unified View on the dashboard, where you can use Acquire Live Chat to communicate with customers in real-time.
You can also funnel all SMS messages, calls, and emails to the dashboard, as well as automate responses to FAQs with a chatbot.
One incredible feature that makes Acquire stand out is co-browsing. It lets your customers share their screen with you so that you can solve any technical problem without a hitch.
They can control what they share, such as hide input fields for credit card details. Troubleshooting has never been easier.
Mailbird
A separate, user-friendly email client can come in pretty handy right now, especially if you have multiple email accounts and receive a large number of emails daily. Mailbird to the rescue!
Mailbird is an email client for Windows that lets you unify as many email accounts as you want. It’s a very intuitive tool with a clean interface that even works offline.
Apart from the unified inbox, you can customize the layout and integrate it with a range of third-party apps. You can search through email attachments and even snooze some messages to focus only on those that matter most, such as customer emails.
Buffer Reply
During this hectic time of COVID-19, you may be getting more social messages than emails and phone calls. Managing all of them in a timely manner can be quite daunting, which is why you need a proper tool.
Buffer offers a robust tool for providing customer support on social media. With Buffer Reply, you can promptly respond to all social conversations and resolve support requests – all in one inbox.
It supports Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and lets you assign conversations to the right team members. It also allows you to leave internal notes, and save snippets to FAQs to accelerate the workflow and eliminate duplicate responses.
Aircall
Aircall is a virtual call center solution that you can use to manage remote teams, book meetings, and close sales deals, and seamlessly connect everyone in your company. It’s also a perfect tool for smooth customer support.
It’s a cloud-based solution that you can integrate with your CRM system, help desk software, and any other tools you use.
You can assign and route calls to the right teammates, forward them to mobile devices, set business hours for each number, make conference calls, record calls, set call queuing, and much more. You can also add local phone numbers for more than 100 countries, which may just be the best feature of Aircall.
Helpjuice
Helpjuice is a knowledge base solution for both internal and external communications. It can be useful for both your customers and customer support agents.
It lets you create a self-service knowledge base that is available 24/7, which is something people really need now. You can publish every little detail regarding your business during the coronavirus crisis, and the tool will update all content pieces in real-time.
Just like ProProfs, it will help you reduce support tickets while giving all your customers and prospects the exact answers they need, whenever they need them.
All of these tools come with a free trial version, so you can see if each is right for your business needs before making any commitments.
Even if you choose only one of them, you’ll have a powerful tool for strengthening customer relationships, especially once the COVID-19 crisis is over. Until then, take care, stay at home and stay safe.
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