What is Customer Service Software and Why is it Important?

eGain clients ranked no 1 in Newsweek's Best Customer Service Companies 2021 List

Customer service software enables a business to automate and augment customer service operations. It helps brands serve their consumers’ transactional, informational, and diagnostic needs during the course of the customer’s lifecycle with the business, all the way from research to buy to post-sales service.

A narrow definition of the category can imply any software that is used to interact with customers and serve their needs – live chat software where customers text or video chat with the business, email management software, messaging channel support, IVR software, self-service knowledge base software.

A more complete definition would include not just the software for interaction management, but also best practices in usage, integration among channels, omnichannel knowledge access, and analytics to measure and manage customer journey and engagement.

Customer Service Software: A List of Features

Self-service

Offer your customers digital self-service that is as smart as them, on mobile and Web.
Provide relevant, contextual knowledge on your website.
Offer multiple access methods (including AI guidance) to find the right answer.
Enable automated assistance through virtual assistants or chatbots. The chatbot should have deep knowledge of your domain and guide visitors through a tour of the website.
Most crucially, allow seamless, context-aware escalation from self-service to assisted channels like email, chat, or voice.
If possible, have a DIY knowledge base portal builder that will get your self-service website up and running in no time.

AI-infused knowledge management

Knowledge for customers and contact center agents.
Compliant, updated, accurate, and consistent answers across channels.
For process guidance and decision-making.
Multimodal access—search, browse, FAQ, topic tree browsing, Artificial Intelligence-based guided help—to the knowledge base. Agents can choose the access method to use according to their need and expertise.
Multilingual knowledge base to serve a global customer base from the same system.

Timely intervention through chat, video, click-to-call, cobrowsing

Offer live chat or click to talk assistance at those points in a customer journey where customers are known to get stuck. Timely intervention has been proven to dramatically improve customer experiences and increase sales.
Combine the chat and voice channels with cobrowsing where customer can benefit from personalized handholding, such as during an online insurance onboarding process.

Contextual offers

Set business rules and configure offers for proactive chat, content, or marketing offers at the time of need.
Offer management with A/B testing so that you can optimize offers for maximum output.

Platform

A customer engagement hub platform unifies context, knowledge, and analytics for all channels in your customer service organization. This enables a 360-degree view of the customer and ensures customer service that is connected and effective. This will delight your customers and accrue benefits to the business.
Use data adapters to integrate your customer service solution with the other systems—data, CRM, legacy—in your business, to be able to leverage them to provide the best service.
Offer a blended desktop to your advisors for maximum efficiency.

Analytics

Data and analytics provide insights into customer behavior and service gaps.
Get reports on gaps in knowledge usage, and trend in customer queries.
Use actionable data from the solution to predict customer requirements and push timely information proactively to deflect incoming traffic and enhance customer satisfaction.

Proactive notifications

Know your customer’s favored channels of communication and send notifications and alerts about product updates, renewals, offers, etc.
This is also a unique opportunity to push sales from the customer service platform by upselling and cross-selling.

Challenges of not having the right software

Customers complain of inadequate information on self-service websites. This forces them to call your contact center leading to customer frustration and increased costs for the business.
Customers like self-service but want assistance when they are stuck.
Customers complain that your customer service contact center agents aren’t able to provide the right answers to their service questions.
Customers complain that they have to be the glue in the service conversation. that the customer service channels are working in silos.
Customer service is reactive.

Traits of a mature customer service software

Secure and compliant
Silo breaking
Flexible, risk-free, and easy to deploy
Shaped by best practices
Easy to use
Proactive
Reliable, available, scalable
Designed for knowledge-sharing and collaboration

The best customer service software of 2022

The market is flooded with software that enable businesses to provide either live chat assistance or email response management or social media customer service. Some offer virtual assistance on the website and a basic FAQ in the name of web self-service, but without an escalation path to assisted service. These types of software are lightweight but without the depth of functionality that mature platform-based software like eGain provide.

Your customers don’t differentiate between channels when they contact you and neither should you. eGain enables the omnichannel experience that customers expect.

eGain is the leading knowledge-powered customer service software in the industry helping blue-chip clients engage, acquire, and serve customers by delivering easy customer journeys.

Its Conversation Hub is designed to offer its users a digital-first but omnichannel experience. All channels are backed by AI and ML-powered Knowledge Hub that helps to resolve customer issues consistently and accurately through self-service or agent assistance. And finally, customer service is optimized to perfection with insights from the Analytics Hub.

eGain customer service software includes

Digital engagement channels, from email, chat, cobrowsing, messaging to social media
Collaboration capabilities
Connected view across traditional and digital channels
Deep integration with external software and third-party contact center and CRM systems
Secure cloud
Compliant knowledge
Proactive customer service
Analytics by channel, journey, and knowledge use
A free pilot to test the software before buying

The key factor when choosing your customer service software

Is the software available for a test drive in the real world before you sign on the dotted line?

A vendor confident of its product will let you implement the software in a production setting to see its value and only then ask you to decide to buy it or not. eGain does exactly that with its Innovation in 30 Days program.

Our award-winning top-rated customer engagement software (eGain Conversations Hub™/ eGain Knowledge Hub™/ eGain Analytics Hub™), our cloud
Implement the use case—Two weeks of discovery, design, and configuration
Put it into production—Two weeks of operation
Experience the WOW!
Then you decide: Continue or quit
No cost, no catch, no commitment

Leaders trust eGain with their customers’ service experiences

US federal agency saves millions with knowledge guided customer service. The agency oversees healthcare, financial services, and benefits administration for its membership, which is several million strong.

“eGain understood our business and the specific requirements of telecoms customer service. This is critical as we enter the next phase of our eCare strategy, where we plan to introduce innovations such as mobile care and social media services.”

“It is our goal to be the best water company in the UK and to achieve this we need to differentiate ourselves by being the leaders in customer service. We will continue to work with eGain to provide innovative customer service options and further improve customer experience.”

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