Best customer service software for your small business

Did you know that 86% of buyers will become repeat customers of brands that offer a better customer experience? Reports also indicate that 49% of buyers make impulse purchases due to personalized responses. 

Providing excellent customer experience (CX) is crucial for any business, regardless of its size. 

However, addressing customer inquiries and requests  manually is challenging. Thus, it’s essential to invest in customer service software that provides a seamless and hassle-free customer experience.

With numerous options available in the market, it can become overwhelming to choose the best SMB customer service software for your business. Here is a list of top 10 customer service software for small businesses that will help you make the right choice. 

Why small businesses need customer service software

Small businesses require exceptional customer service software to effectively manage and respond to customer inquiries, build strong relationships, streamline operations, and compete with larger enterprises. High-quality customer service is a key differentiator and driver of success for small businesses. 

Furthermore, small businesses need scalable solutions that can grow alongside them, adapting to increasing customer volumes and demands as the company expands. These software platforms offer valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends, helping small businesses tailor their offerings, marketing strategies, and product development, thus driving sustainable growth.

Top 10 customer service software for your small business

#1: Freshdesk

The Freshdesk is a powerful and comprehensive platform for engaging with customers. It effortlessly blends the capabilities of AI-driven chat with ticketing functions. Freshdesk assists businesses in orchestrating, optimizing, and enhancing customer engagement throughout their entire journey. 

It enables seamless interaction across a range of channels. Focusing on personalization and proactivity, it allows businesses to provide tailor-made services that align with their customers' preferences. Furthermore, it utilizes customer data, feedback, and behavior to improve engagement tactics and campaigns.

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Key features

• Freddy AI Copilot:  Freddy AI Copilot is an ever-present assistant that can offer replies, propose solutions, and provide an overview of events.

• Automation: Seamlessly integrate rich app integrations through APIs with current systems to enable automated data synchronization and exchange.

• Single source of truth: Boost the efficiency of agents by providing them with the ability to customize their service in real time. Access all customer engagements across various platforms in a single location.

• Reporting and analytics: Using reporting and analytics, you can gain insights into your support performance with detailed reporting and analytics, helping you make data-driven decisions for improvement and achieve customer satisfaction. 

Pricing

Pros 

• A feature-rich platform. 

• Cost-effective for small businesses.

• Easy to integrate with other platforms.

• Advanced workflow automation.

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#2: Help Scout

Help Scout offers easy-to-use and efficient customer support software for your small business. It focuses on centralizing customer support and delivering collaborative responses, ensuring every chat and email receives a reply.

Key features

• Centralized email management: Help Scout centralize all customer emails into a shared inbox, making it easier for your team to collaborate on queries and ensuring no email goes unnoticed. This is especially beneficial if you connect with your audience primarily through emails.

• Help desk: The help center is a unified platform where customers can find solutions for their queries using knowledge-based articles and forums.

• Collaborative workflows: Help Scout arm your team with a unique feature called "collision detection" that prevents multiple replies to the same ticket by multiple agents.

• Customization: The platform offers customized plans tailored to individuals and teams, with over 100 integrations.

Pros

• Intuitive interface for easy team collaboration and customer support.

• Automated responses and routing options.

Cons

• Pricing is higher for small businesses or startups.

• Lack of advanced features required for complex operations.

• Limited third-party integrations compared to some competitors.

#3: Hiver

Hiver's customer support software offers an easy-to-access interface that closely resembles Gmail. Hiver can be a good choice if you are a small business heavily reliant on Gmail for communication. It converts your Gmail into a shared workspace, allowing collaboration among your team members for quicker responses.

Key features

• Email notes and tags: By leveraging this feature on the Hiver, you can prioritize and categorize important queries and customers' needs by adding simple tags and internal notes.

• Email management: Hiver equips you with a seamless email management system with many features. These include end-to-end accountability, automated email responses, round-robin email assignments, and a resolution status tracker.

• Automation: Hiver's customer service software offers features such as Harvey, the AI bot, and email body search automation that intelligently close non-actionable responses and sets trigger conditions, making email content more contextual.

• Customer Surveys (CSAT): Hiver offers CSAT surveys to collect feedback from your customers. You can send customer surveys to measure customer satisfaction using these surveys. This will help you to make data-driven decisions in the future.

Pros

• Streamlines email management with shared inboxes.

• Easy to set up and use.

Cons 

• Costs may increase with additional users and features.

• Limited flexibility for specific business needs. 

#4: Zendesk

Zendesk help desk offers a broad range of integrations, from CRM to social media, to centralize your entire support system. Its user-friendly interface harnesses powerful AI features to boost performance and productivity.

Key features

• Zendesk conversation: Zendesk provides a personalized platform for seamless conversations across various channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Apple Business Chat. With this, your customers can reach out to you through their preferred messaging apps, helping you achieve greater customer satisfaction.

• Zendesk explore: Zendesk Explore is a robust analytics tool that provides reporting metrics based on ticket responses. Automation coupled with the Zendesk Explore can help create advanced analytics reports for customer behavior and demographics.

• Zendesk marketplace: Zendesk's sales marketplace offers various integrations and apps that you can select to enhance functionalities across different channels. This feature lets you customize your CRM and sales automation to meet business needs.

• Email templates: The solution provides thousands of customizable email templates to enhance customer experience.

Pros

• Manage support across various communication channels.

• Reporting and analytics tools for data-driven decision-making.

Cons

• Pricing can be prohibitive for small businesses or startups.

• Complex features may require significant training and onboarding.

• Basic features in the free plan may not suffice for all.

#5: Intercom

Intercom is one of the potent automation tools and proactive support system enable you to cut support costs and elevate productivity while enhancing customer satisfaction.

Intercom offers 5x faster-automated onboarding and AI-assisted tools that summarize conversations, expand replies, and rephrase answers. You can manage all your support platforms through Intercom's shared inbox.

Key features

• Enhanced ticket management: Intercom offers an automated ticket management system to deliver personalized and contextual resolutions to customer queries.

• Intercom messenger: Intercom Messenger is a powerful tool that complements other features, empowering your customers with the choice of self-service or live support.

• Integrations: The software supports over 350 integrations, including email, ticketing, chatbots, reporting, chat support, and CRM software to improve functionality.

• Cloud-based security system: Intercom ensures the safety of your data with its cloud-based security system.

• Help center articles: Provides your customers with helpful content through an integrated self-serve portal featuring a knowledge base.

Pros 

• Enables live chat and messaging for customer interactions.

• Collects and utilizes customer data for targeted communication.

Cons

• Lack of robust knowledge base capabilities for self-service 

• Pricing can be expensive and complex, making budgeting challenging.

• Reporting and analytics capabilities are less comprehensive 

#6: Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is another customer service software for small businesses. Their help desk software simplifies customer support processes by providing an omnichannel solution that seamlessly integrates channels like chats, phone calls, emails, and messages. Zoho Desk leverages AI-driven insights and data to elevate your customer relationship management.

Key features

• Work modes: Zoho Desk equips you with personalized work modes that automatically organize open tickets, boosting agent productivity.

• Response editor: You can craft and send custom messages using previous responses, FAQs, and more.

• Mobility: The software adapts to mobile devices, letting you manage tickets from anywhere, anytime.

Pros

• Offers cost-effective plans suitable for small businesses.

• Offers integrations with other Zoho apps

Cons

• Face limitations in handling the demands of complex situations.

• There are gaps in the availability of specific third-party integrations.

• Reporting and analytics capabilities are less comprehensive

#7: ServiceNow

ServiceNow is a cloud-based customer service software for small businesses. The CSM software provided by ServiceNow includes comprehensive case management systems, self-service portals, omnichannel support, and real-time reporting with a user-friendly interface. 

Key features

• Case management: ServiceNow's case management system helps you address customer queries and streamline ticket-raising processes.

• Knowledge management: The solution provides one of the most comprehensive knowledge bases that allows small businesses to create and maintain repositories of articles, FAQs, and guides to optimize self-service portals.

• AI-powered insights: ServiceNow's AI-powered tools enable you to extract valuable insights and data from customer interactions, providing valuable guidance for your sales team.

Pros

• Suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises

• customizable workflows to specific organizational needs

Cons 

• Pricing can be high, especially for smaller businesses or limited deployments.

• Complex licensing and subscription management processes.

• Requires dedicated resources and time for setup

#8: WotNot

WotNot is known for its no-code chatbot-building features. With WotNot, you can craft inbound and outbound chatbots for various tasks, such as providing instant responses, running promotional campaigns, collecting feedback, and offering proactive support solutions. WotNot can boost your returns by generating more leads with personalized responses.

Key features

• WhatsApp chatbot: You can create a WhatsApp Chatbot for your business through Wotnot and reach your customers worldwide.

• Appointment booking: You can filter prospects and add high-quality leads to your sales team's calendar by automating appointment bookings.

• Live chat: Connect your customers to the right agent and provide information-rich responses using WotNot's Live Chat support.

Pros

• Powerful automation capabilities for process optimization 

• Provides in-depth analytics and reporting

Cons

• Pricing is high for smaller businesses or limited deployments.

• The learning curve for administrators and users is due to feature-rich complexity.

• Lack of robust knowledge base capabilities

#9: HappyFox

HappyFox is customer service software designed for small businesses to help manage all inbound queries with a unified ticketing system. The HappyFox ticket management system converts conversations from different channels, such as emails, phone calls, chats, and web requests, into organized tickets. You also have the flexibility to design customized workflows and tailor them for optimal customer service solutions.

Key features

• Task management: You can create a personalized task template and use it for multiple tickets. Task templates help you prioritize and customize your tickets for better responses.

• Satisfaction surveys: The platform helps you initiate surveys using automated templates to gather valuable customer feedback.

• Automation: HappyFox is powered by advanced AI tools to provide hassle-free customer service solutions. This reduces the need for an extensive workforce and significantly cuts down on hiring costs, a crucial advantage for small businesses.

Pros

• Offers live chat functionality

• Conducts surveys to gather valuable feedback

Cons 

• Lacks campaign management capabilities

• Doesn't provide comprehensive performance metrics

• Does not offer email management features

#10: Proprofs Desk

Proprofs is a customer service software designed specifically for small businesses, providing comprehensive solutions for internal and external support requirements. It helps you automate repetitive tasks, collaborate better, and make data-driven strategic decisions.

Key features

• Range of integrations: You can integrate seamlessly with third-party applications like Salesforce, CRM software, and social media platforms.

• Shared email software: Shared inbox software, also known as team inbox, allows multiple team members to read and send emails simultaneously from a shared email account such as support@company. 

• Customer complaint management system: Your agents can quickly allocate, categorize, and handle customer concerns on a single dashboard, ensuring that your clients enjoy a consistent support experience.

Pros

• Offers a simple and intuitive interface

• Provides a wide range of extensions 

Cons

• Lacks a dedicated mobile app

• Does not support skill-based routing

• Offers only basic rules and limited automation

Small business customer service software considerations

Selecting customer service software for your small business is a crucial decision. Numerous factors must be considered to ensure effective support and a smooth customer experience. Here are some of the crucial factors to take into account:

• Scalability: Ensure it accommodates growth without excessive costs or complexity.

• Ease of use: User-friendly for quick adoption by your team.

• Cost-effectiveness: Fits within your budget, including subscription and setup fees.

• Multichannel support: Handles various customer communication channels effectively.

• Integration options: Offers seamless integration with your existing tools and systems.

Freshdesk- the best customer service software for your small business

Every customer service software offers distinct advantages and can deliver positive outcomes, helping you to choose what suits you best. Choosing the ideal customer service software depends on several factors, including your business objectives, team size, financial resources, and target audience.

Freshdesk is one of the most reliable customer service software for small businesses, with a proven success and scalability track record. It provides a wide range of features and integrations with budget-friendly options. Freshdesk's advanced Al integrations can reduce your workload and increase team productivity.