11 support tools every customer service team should have

Email is one of the top ways that customers choose to contact businesses. In fact, 49% of consumers Zendesk surveyed said email was their preferred customer service channel.

It’s usually the first channel a business gets up and running. It takes little effort and is pretty universal.

“As a blanket, you want to have email,” says Abhiroop Basu, Zendesk Director of Product Marketing. “All your customers will have an email address, so it’s a natural starting point for customer support.”

With email messages, set expectations up front. For example, if it usually takes four hours or less for your team to handle a support email, set up automatic email replies that will tell people their message has been received and should be resolved within the next four hours. If people are given a time frame, they’ll be less impatient.

Voice is the only channel more popular with customers than email. Sixty-six percent of respondents said they typically resolved issues with a company over the phone.

It’s not too surprising that the more traditional the channel, the more deeply it’s ingrained as a customer expectation. A lot of customers like being able to get a real-time answer, from a real human being, over the phone. This is especially true if your company sells a product or service that’s pretty technical, and your customers require more hand-holding.

Speed is also an important factor. Live channels, like phone, are almost 13 times faster than email. If you want your company to be known for providing speedy customer service (and you should), invest in your call center.

Only 24% of customers typically use live chat to communicate with a company. With that said, it’s a channel that’s becoming increasingly popular with consumers.

Chat has been the fastest-growing channel for the last five years among companies that use Zendesk. More than four times as many customers are using chat in 2020 than did in 2015.

Embedding live chat on your website is especially important for ecommerce companies. After all, it’s basically a virtual version of a shopkeeper you can always ask questions of while you’re browsing the store.

As a company gets larger, they may be overwhelmed by live chat conversations and need to rely on artificial intelligence to handle some of those interactions. You can use a chatbot tool to automate responses to common questions, gather information, and seamlessly transition more complicated conversations from bots to live agents.

Messaging differs from chat by not requiring customers to wait on the website or chat widget for a response. Since the conversation doesn’t have to happen in real time, it’s more convenient for both the customer and the support agent.

Though relatively new, and less common than channels like phone and email, messaging apps were found to have the highest customer satisfaction (CSAT) ratings of any communication channel, according to our study.

Research your customer base to determine which social messaging platforms are most relevant to them. For example, we found that messaging has become especially common among companies in Central and South America. In that part of the world, the popularity of social messaging apps like WhatsApp has led businesses to adopt it as a service channel.

“In countries like Brazil, social messaging apps, and WhatsApp specifically, have become the de facto method of communication for everyone,” says Basu. “So, it’s no surprise that nearly every company in Brazil offers a WhatsApp number for support.”

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys gauge the quality of your customer service interactions and help you set objectives for improving them.

Zendesk automatically sends customer satisfaction surveys 24 hours after every support interaction. Our CSAT surveys simply ask whether the experience was “Good” or “Bad.” That doesn’t leave a lot of room for nuance, but the shortness of the questionnaire maximizes response rates.

Segmenting CSAT scores can tell you a lot about your business. Which communication channels are people most satisfied with, and which ones are frustrating customers? Which support agents have the happiest customers, and which agents need some more training?

CSAT scores are especially important to younger businesses that are still building their customer base.

“If you’re a new startup that’s competing with larger, more established incumbents, you probably care a lot about customer satisfaction,” Basu says. “You want to measure your customer satisfaction and make sure it stays high.”

As your company grows larger, efficiency might overtake customer satisfaction as your chief concern. You need performance reports on your customer support team to see what’s working well and what could be optimized.

You’ll want to record certain customer support metrics that speak to the efficiency of your support agents. What are the average response times for your agents? How many interactions are they solving? Is volume increasing or decreasing?

Measure both individual agent performance and the productivity of your entire support team. That way, you can zero in on general areas of improvement as well as specific support agents who may be struggling.