What is Customer Service Software?

Customer service software enables a business to automate customer self-service processes and support frontline support representatives as they serve customers. In an increasingly competitive market, customer service is a key—if not the only—differentiator. Per Forrester, a single-point improvement in CX Index score drives up to $1.2B in annual incremental revenue.

Customer service software ensures that the service is prompt, accurate, consistent, and compliant with regulations. It creates exceptional experiences for customers and frontline employees, contributes to topline revenue, and reduces costs.

Customer service spans the entire lifecycle of the engagement process from research to purchase and post-sales support operations. It can take place within and across many touchpoints and modes.

Effective customer service has evolved beyond traditional phone service channel into a complex ecosystem of digital and physical touchpoints.

Touchpoints

• Digital channels: Digital self-service such as virtual assistance, secure messaging, SMS and messaging apps, live chat, cobrowse, social, email, in-app support, etc.
• Brick-and-mortar channels: Retail stores, branch offices, field offices, onsite, etc.

Modes

• Self-service (e.g., on website, in app, IVR, etc.)
• Human-assisted service (e.g., contact center, branch office, retail)
• Multimodal (e.g., cobrowsing, combined with concurrent phone call or chat)

The customer service process consists of three distinct phases:

1. Connect: Today’s typical customer communicates across multiple channels and is digital first.

Due to this, businesses should provide a variety of ways for the customers to interact with them.

2. Solve: The next step is to identify and resolve customer requests or problems. Businesses should have processes and knowledge in place to answer questions, solve problems as they arise, or provide advice as needed.

A proactive approach involves predicting future problems and providing advice to customers to prevent those issues. This is where knowledge and AI software can come in to provide self-assistance methods and automation.

3. Optimize: The final step is to optimize customer interactions so that it is efficient and effective for the customer and the business.

Effective customer service tools should create seamless and frictionless interactions with customers. The goal is for them to walk away with clear, accurate information that resolves their issues.

Below are critical capabilities that businesses should look for when building out their customer service tools.

• Omnichannel Support: Allow customers to interact through their preferred communication channel including email, chat, social media, phone, and messaging apps.
• Handle simple questions: Handling basic and medium-level customer questions can be automated through the use of a chatbot or interactive voice response (IVR). This means customers can get answers quickly, even outside regular business hours or different time zones.
• Keep answers consistent: Using customer service software backed by a single centralized knowledge base helps ensure all answers are up-to-date, accurate, and the same across all channels.
• Advanced search functionality: Provide quick access to helpful information such as FAQs, articles, and guides.
• Intelligent escalation capabilities: Automatically routes complex issues to human agents for inquiries that require expertise and nuance.
• Intelligent ticket routing: Includes a ticketing system that automatically directs customer inquiries to the most appropriate agent or department.
• Real-Time analytics and reporting: Provide insights into support team performance and customer satisfaction to drive decision-making.
• Multilingual support: A knowledge base that supports various languages lets you help customers globally.

Automated and Personalized Customer Experiences

A knowledge hub combined with AI assistance is a powerful duo in the world of digital customer service. Let’s explore a few ways that they can help.

• Automate content creation: Generative AI can assist in writing help articles and other content to guide both customers and customer service teams. This makes creating content faster and helps ensure it’s accurate and easy to understand.
• Guide conversations: Assisted guidance can help agents ask the right questions and gather important information based on what the customer needs. This makes agents’ jobs easier and reduces training time, reliance on memorization, and the time to wrap up calls.

Self Service Options

• Website resources: Provide relevant, contextual knowledge on your website. These resources should be well organized and search-optimized to help customers find solutions quickly and without additional assistance.
• Multiple access methods: Providing various options can cater to different learning styles. Multiple search functions, interactive troubleshooting guides, video tutorials, and community forums offer unique ways to convey information.
• Virtual assistants or chatbot: These tools should have deep knowledge of your business, understand complex queries, and provide personalized recommendations.
• Escalation to assisted channels: Self-service solutions cannot always resolve an issue. Customer service solutions should be able to provide a seamless hand-off from self-service to assisted channels like email, chat, or voice.

A good customer engagement platform is essential for providing great service across different channels. The best platforms are built on open architecture and come with ready-made connections to CRM systems, contact centers, and content management systems.

The platform is the foundation for customer service and allows for composable experiences for customers, agents, employees, and business managers. Let’s dive into the various channels that customer service software can support.

Messaging

SMS and messaging apps such as Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, and others.

Live chat software or click to talk assistance can provide help with common roadblocks or concerns, and provide contextual offers. Timely intervention has been proven to dramatically improve customer experiences and increase sales.

Cobrowsing

With cobrowsing, an agent can guide a customer step-by-step for processes such as online insurance onboarding. This in combination with chat, click-to-call, and voice channels can ensure the customer feels fully supported.

Social, email

Apps such as Facebook, Instagram, and others provide alternative channels to assist customers and receive feedback.

Email and fax

While customer service has evolved to encompass other digital channels, traditional email is still a key communication channel.

An email management system can enforce industry compliance requirements, manage service fulfillment, and automate business processes.

Contextual offers

Visitors can receive offers that match their interests. These offers can be based on past conversations with agents and how they engage with the website.

This is also an opportunity to use A/B testing for proactive and contextual chat, content, or marketing offers.

Broadly, customer support software providers fall in the following categories:

1. Best-in-class providers

These vendors are focused on the customer service space and offer rich out-of-the-box functionality for quick business value. They are also known for their track record of consistent innovation and customer success at scale.

Their clients tend to rank high in customer service benchmarks such as the Forrester CX Index, J.D. Power’s CSAT index, and others.

Pro: Offer best-in-class solutions that deliver immediate value and have proven success with leading companies.

Con: Higher upfront costs and may come with more features than smaller businesses need.

2. CRM vendors

A customer relationship management (CRM) system stores customer data and keeps records of interactions between a business and their clients.

Pro: Provide integration between sales, marketing, and service data in one system.

Con: They typically come from a sales force automation (SFA) background and require significant customization and technical expertise to fully implement, leading to longer deployment times.

3. CCaaS providers

Contact Center-as-a-Service providers are mainly focused on the telephony infrastructure required by contact centers.

Pro: Excel at voice and telephony infrastructure with robust call center features

Con: Offer limited capabilities in digital channels and typically need third parties such as eGain for comprehensive service.

4. Do-it-all vendors

These vendors support all aspects of the customer service cycle from voice, online chat, knowledge bases, and more.

Pro: Offer a single vendor solution for all customer service needs, simplifying vendor management

Con: Quality may be inconsistent across different features, with some capabilities being notably weaker than others. It’s important to assess each of their functionalities to make sure the quality of customer service is not compromised.

5. Point product providers

These are providers that focus on one specific aspect of the customer journey. Tools that offer a stand-alone telephony or live chat tool are examples of point products in customer service.

Pro: Delivers exceptional performance in their specialized service.

Con: While effective at their function, they require other tools alongside them to completely support the customer journey.

6. Toolkit vendors

A toolkit vendor provides a comprehensive set of tools, APIs, and development resources that allow businesses to build and customize solutions into their existing systems.

Pro: Offer maximum flexibility and customization to match exact business requirements.

Con: While beneficial for customization, toolkits often require technical expertise from IT organizations to implement. This can lead to long time to value and high TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).

7. Brochureware providers

Brochureware refers to a static, marketing-focused web page with limited functional capabilities. These providers create websites that provide basic information about their products but lack interactive customer service features.

Pro: Usually look impressive, are cost-effective, and easy to implement.

Con: Typically lack meaningful functionality beyond basic information display, severely limiting actual customer service capabilities. To provide best-in-class customer experiences, functionalities beyond a digital brochure are needed to have meaningful interactions with prospects and customers.

Choosing the right solution requires careful consideration of your organization’s specific needs, goals, and technical requirements.

Key Considerations for Customer Service Software Vendors

When evaluating potential solutions, businesses should think about:

• Scalability: Can the system grow with your organization? Can it handle increasing content volume and user base?
• Ease of use: How intuitive is the interface for both administrators and end-users? Will internal and external users be able to navigate and adopt this system?
• Customization options: Can you personalize the system to match your brand and specific requirements?
• Support and maintenance: What level of technical assistance does the vendor provide? Are they able to provide content and design recommendations based on your specific needs?
• Total cost of ownership: Beyond initial licensing, what are the long-term costs? Can you identify the processes where the system can drive costs down over time?

More Questions to Consider:

• Is it rich in features out of the box or is it mainly a toolkit requiring you to do extensive programming and customization for best-in-class features?
• Is it a point product or an unsiloed omnichannel solution?
• Does it address all phases of the customer engagement process—connect, solve, and optimize with breadth and depth of out-of-the-box capabilities?
• Can it deliver quick value?
• Can the vendor show proof of success at scale?
• Can the vendor bring best practices to the deployment, based on experience in the space?
• Does it offer risk-free way to pilot free of charge in a production setting and adopt?
• Is it secure and compliant with industry standards such as PCI, NIST SP 800-53, HIPAA, and FedRAMP?

International Airline

A global airline with over 225 aircraft and operations in more than 200 destinations is committed to becoming one of the world’s greatest service brands, placing customers at the core of its operations.

The company had built knowledge silos over time, making it difficult to provide consistent service and a single source of truth for customer service agents. They wanted to implement a single platform to remediate this and achieve content organization, search capabilities, and integration with existing systems.

By leveraging eGain’s AI knowledge management solution, they were able to achieve:

• 500 agents accessing the Knowledge Hub daily
• Streamlined communication through announcements
• Enforced compliance with read-and-sign

Read the full story here.

SaaS company

This 25-year-old payroll and human capital management SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) provider is one of Fortune 100’s fastest-growing companies.

Frontline agents struggled with the volume and breadth of customer queries, and siloed knowledge within the organization.

They leveraged the eGain Knowledge Hub to improve customer experiences, encourage collaboration, and scale customer service with business growth. In six months, the provider saw:

• 10x more knowledge articles being contributed per month compared to the previous initiative
• 6x more suggestions
• 460% increase in average monthly searches
• 300% increase in article views
• 40% decrease in escalations to second-tier support

Read the full story here.

eGain provides digital-first, knowledge and AI-powered customer service platform. We help businesses provide exceptional customer service, reduce roadblocks for agents, and provide trusted answers.

Our customer service software platform is comprised of the following components to deliver seamless, contextual, and personalized customer service.

Conversation hub

Conversations are everything in customer service. The hub approach unifies all customer interaction channels such as messaging, live chat, email, social, cobrowsing, notifications, and phone, in one place.

Key benefit:

• 360-degree context: Customer service agents have all of the information needed for effective assistance. It eliminates the need to ask for the “mother’s maiden name” repeatedly as the customer goes from one channel to another.

Knowledge hub

The knowledge hub eliminates inconsistent silos of content and knowhow, creating one trusted hub that delivers correct, consistent, and compliant answers and process expertise in the flow of work. It unifies and orchestrates knowledge and AI building blocks including content management, intent inference, generative AI automation, conversational AI guidance, knowledge analytics, and integrations.

Key benefits:

• Eliminates silos: inconsistent silos of content and know-how can lead to confusion and delay in getting to the right information. A knowledge hub provides a central source of information leading to consistent, accurate answers.
• Increase in agent confidence: Agents are armed with consumable, contextual information from the hub and don’t need to rely on memory to recall answers.
• Speed time to resolution: Customer issues can be resolved faster, either through self-service means or agent assistance.

Analytics hub

The analytics hub consolidates operational, knowledge, and customer journey analytics in one place. This makes real-time optimization of contact center operations and knowledge performance possible.

Key benefits:

• Measure team performance: Agent and team performance can be measured and monitored, identifying coaching opportunities where needed.
• Measure content performance: Knowledge managers and authors can view which content is being used the most often, revisit the quality of their content, and refresh articles to keep them up to date.
• Identify operational improvements: Areas for improvement or one-off incidents that affect contact centers can be identified.

We take pride in our recognition by analysts such as Gartner and Forrester as a leader in the industry. eGain clients consistently rank at the top in Forrester CX Index and Newsweek customer service performance index.

• Rated #1 in the combined score of digital engagement, knowledge management, and automation capabilities by Gartner
• Rated #1 in digital-first customer service by Forrester
• Rated #1 in knowledge management for customer service by Gartner
• Selected as the Readers’ Choice by KMWorld magazine readers and online community
• Named to the AI 50 list by KMWorld

If you’d like to explore how eGain can create better experiences for your customers, our Innovation in 30 Days program offers a production pilot of our customer engagement software

With guidance from an expert, this program provides two weeks of design and configuration followed by two weeks of operation for your use case. This comes at no cost, no catch, and no commitment!

Contact us