15 Best Customer Support Software of 2023

Introduction

Great customer support can result in a great customer experience.

Quality customer support software is the key to doing so. It streamlines the support workflow and creates unbreakable trust among customers.

However, finding the right software is crucial so that it suits your business requirements and can be used to its full potential.

To make sure you nail the decision, we have prepared a guide to help you better understand the benefits and features of customer support software.

Also, we have compiled a list of some of the best customer support software in the market.

So, without any further delay, let’s jump right in.

What is customer support software?

Customer support software helps the support teams to manage and respond to customer queries easily and quickly. It offers a range of powerful features that help the customer support department streamline its workflow, such as one-page ticketing, omnichannel support, self-service, analytics, automation, canned responses, etc. Using the best customer support software ensures that timely customer support solutions are provided to the customers and helps the service agents enhance their efficiency and productivity.

Main Benefits of Using the Best Customer Support Software

i. Offer Consistent Support to Customers

When managing hundreds of queries each day, it’s essential to have some extra help. For example, you are working on a web development project that requires 3-4 web developers. But what if they are on leave and you are the only one who has to complete the project on the given deadline and with maximum accuracy? Isn’t it a lot for a single person to manage? Of course, it is.

Similarly, when it comes to customer support, hundreds of queries are tough to manage without extra help. But it gets a lot easier after using customer support software. It has features that can help agents work efficiently, improve their productivity, and offer quick customer service solutions to customers. With the help of customer service software, your service department can successfully offer consistent support to your customers.

ii. Collect Valuable Customer Data

Not a single customer is similar to one another. Every customer has different needs and expectations of a product or service. For example, there are 2 customers, customer A and customer B. Customer A would purchase a t-shirt based on the material and comfort, no matter the price. On the other hand, customer B would select a t-shirt that is budget-friendly. Similarly, every other customer would have some different criteria in their minds to select a product.

So, the biggest question for businesses is how to optimize the product or service for the customers to satisfy them. The answer is by collecting valuable customer data with the help of customer service software. This data can clear the picture for your business. It showcases how much percentage of the audience is purchasing high-quality products or how much percentage is collecting a budget-friendly product, etc. This will allow you to not only optimize your product but also optimize the strategies that you have created to attract customers.

iii. Provides 24/7 Customer Support

The demand for customer service has been increasing day by day. Customers nowadays are more proactive than ever before. They do not settle for anything less than what they have expected from the product. And if something goes wrong, they will surely reach out to the customer support department for help. You as a business, have to offer 24/7 customer support to your customers. This is where customer support software can do wonders.

With customer support software, you can offer your customers the benefit of self-service so they can be in the driving seat, helping themselves solve their queries without having to depend on agents. They can easily access self-service mediums such as knowledge base, FAQs, community forums, video tutorials, etc., to find a quick solution for their queries. This way, having the best customer support software by your side ensures your customers get the help they need.

iv. Makes the Collaboration Stronger and More Effective

Collaborating with other team members is crucial to offer quicker and correct customer support solutions to the customers. For example, you are solving a query related to a technical issue that is not your area of expertise. And you need the help of a technical person to solve the query. In such scenarios, if you are not collaborating with the right person, finding a solution might take too long, and the solution might not be on point.

But if collaboration is easy among team members, finding a solution is not that hard. With only a little extra effort, you can provide your customers with the best possible solution. So, how to make collaborating with other team members easy? It is simple; you can just start using customer service software. By doing so, whenever you need their help, you can add team members to the chat and ask them for help.

It is also easier for them because they can access the whole conversation between the agent and the customer once they are added to the chat. They can easily analyze the customer’s issue and offer a quick solution. This way, using the best customer service software makes collaboration easier and even more efficient.

v. Enhances Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

For any business, having a loyal customer base is very crucial. It is one factor that can help you determine how successful your business is. Let’s say you are a startup that recently launched a unique product. Now, like any other business, you also want to know how well your product is doing or are the customers love your product or not. Does it require to be optimized to make it even better for the customers? etc.

From a business perspective, all these questions need to be answered as soon as possible. This is where customer support software comes in; it can help you create customer satisfaction surveys so that you can just send them to the customers and find out what they feel about your product. This way, you can easily get customer feedback and work on improvement. Successfully implementing this feedback strategy can enhance your customer’s satisfaction and loyalty toward your brand.

vi. Agent’s Productivity and Efficiency Increases

Agents are unable to manage their workload effectively, eventually harming the customers’ experience. An ineffective service agent will have a lot of customer queries pending, will take too long to find a solution, will not collaborate with other team members, etc. All these factors directly impact the customer, not in a good way.

Businesses need to make some changes to make the agents more productive. And what is better than using the best customer support software to enhance customer experience? With its help, agents can drastically improve their productivity and efficiency.

As it consists of some of the most powerful features needed for agents. Features such as automation, canned responses, self-service, live chat, etc. All these features ensure that the service agents can manage their workload effectively.

vii. Reduces the Response Time Taken by Agents

Whenever customers reach out to the agents, it is safe to assume they are facing some sort of issue. In such scenarios, if the service agents make the customers wait long, it can negatively impact their experience. The customers would feel frustrated and might never engage with your business again. It is a very huge penalty to pay for what is a very small mistake. Right?

But this is where various businesses are wrong. It is not a small mistake. As a business, you must offer customers the service they need. It is your prime responsibility. The businesses that think it’s all over once the customer purchases any product from them have got it all wrong. Customers purchasing your products is just the start of a never-ending customer journey.

So, make sure that you are on your A-game when it comes to customer support. To begin with, start using customer support software so your customer support team can easily manage customer queries and cut short their response time. Customers expect your support department to respond quickly, and with the help of customer support software, you can allow your service team to live up to the customer’s expectations.

viii. Automates Complex Tasks

It is no secret that automation lowers the workload of humans. In customer service, automation can also help service agents enhance their productivity by automating certain manual tasks. It allows the agents to work more efficiently than ever before.

For example, assigning tasks manually to every individual could be hectic if you are a task manager. But with automation, carrying out the same tasks can become a piece of cake. It is easier, less time-consuming, and more fun when compared to the traditional way of assigning tickets.

Automation ensures that all the tickets are assigned to the most suitable agent based on certain parameters. It also ensures that the tickets’ priority is set so that agents know which tickets to prioritize first. By doing so, high-priority tickets get the agent’s full attention and are solved quickly. This is how automation can help the customer support department to make their work easier and faster.

ix. Integrates Easily with Third-party Apps/Tools

Customer service is a never-ending, complex process. Hence, having extra customer service tools and software at your disposal is always beneficial. So, the process of solving customer queries becomes a lot easy for the agents. Employing the best customer support software ensures your support team gets as much extra help as possible.

Using it already means that you are using the powerful features that it consists of. However, integration is one feature that helps customer service agents reduce their workload and enhance their productivity. Quality customer support software can easily integrate with third-party customer support tools/apps. The agents can use these customer service tools/apps to make the customer support process even easier and quicker.

Most Powerful Features of the Customer Support Software

1. One-page Ticketing System

Just imagine how wonderful it would get if you had access to everything you need, and that too all in one place. The one-page ticketing feature is quite similar for customer support teams. It offers them access to every feature of customer support software. Everything can be accessed from one place without going through any extra hassle, from the new incoming customer queries to the knowledge base. This feature ensures that customer support agents work efficiently and save valuable time.

2. Self-service

Self-service helps customers more than anyone else. Imagine facing an issue with the product you bought from a particular brand, and you do not know how to solve the issue. So, you think of reaching out to the customer support department. But no one is answering your calls or emails, as it is midnight and their working hours are between 9 A.M. and 7 P.M. In such situations, customers find themselves helpless.

But if they are offered self-service, their issue can be solved without service agents’ help. The customer can access the knowledge base or FAQs and look for the article that relates to their issue and read it. Once they have read it, they will have a proper solution for their issue. This way, customers can benefit a lot with the help of self-service. It is one of the most convenient and easy-to-use features of customer support software.

3. Omnichannel Support

How many of you use social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc.? Almost everyone. And we all want businesses to offer their support on these platforms, not just on calls and emails. This is where customer support software plays a crucial role. It allows businesses to offer omnichannel support to their customers. And if we look from a different perspective, it is also beneficial for businesses to offer their customers omnichannel support.

For example, as a customer, if it is not convenient to reach out via email or calls, and if the business does not offer its service on any other platform, the customer would avoid reaching out to you in the first place, which is not good for your business as there is a customer who is having trouble with your product but is not reaching out. This creates a negative experience for the customer. This might hurt your business in the long run. Hence, it is very crucial to offer omnichannel support to your customers so that they can easily reach out to you and you can also easily help them.

4. Integration

Customer support software is all about making the service agent’s work easy and less time-consuming. And to help them do so, its integration feature plays a vital role. Customer support agents are always looking for apps/tools that can make the customer support process easy for them so they can manage the workload effectively and provide timely customer support solutions to the customers.

What integration feature does it have? It allows the service agents to integrate the required third-party apps/tools with the customer support software. Customer service agents can get extra third-party apps/tools features by integration. This way, as the required third-party apps/tools are integrated with the software, agents can easily use more features and manage the customer’s queries. This feature can also allow agents to increase their productivity and efficiency.

5. Analytics and Reporting

Customer support departments are loaded with customer queries. If the agents solve 100 queries, 100 more will be waiting for them. Hence, there is always room for improvement to convert their service from good to great. And what better than the analytics feature to let the customer support department know which areas need improvement?

Analytics shows you all the data, such as the average time taken to respond to newly generated customer queries, the average time taken to resolve the customer query, the average time taken by a particular customer support agent to solve queries, etc. All this data can give the service teams insights into which agents need improvement and what strategic changes can be made for better results.

6. Canned Responses

Just imagine it is a normal working day, and you have a lot of work, so you are trying hard to focus on it. In such situations, how frustrating it would get if all your colleagues ask you the same questions individually. Quite frustrating. Because now you have already lost your focus and are fed up answering the same questions repeatedly. The same situation takes place with customer service agents.

There are a lot of customer queries to look after already, and in such situations, hundreds of customers ask the same questions over and over again. The agents might not be able to focus on crucial customer queries. So, to avoid getting stuck in such a situation, agents can use the canned responses feature. These are predefined responses created for most recurring customer queries.

For example, if a query like “How many days are taken for the refund to get credited?” is the most asked query for an eCommerce business. A canned response can be created to answer this query. Once the canned responses are created, whenever such a query is raised, the agents can answer this query with just a click of a button. This way, the agent’s effort and time can be saved. These canned responses can also be posted on your website in the form of FAQs.

7. Automation

Everyone likes a little extra help, and automation has been providing that help for decades now. Let it be automating huge machinery for factories or managing certain crucial tasks in customer service. Automation can do it all. It helps service agents to manage customer queries effectively and offer a timely solution to the customers. With the help of automation, the service agents can reply to customer queries 20% faster and improve their productivity by 25%.

Here are a few benefits of using the automation feature of customer support software:

• Automatic ticket routing
• Setting automatic ticket priority
• Triggering email notifications
• Automate the inbox-cleaning process

These automation benefits can ensure that the agents are on top of every customer query.

Industries that Can Benefit After Employing the Best Customer Support Software

i. IT Industry

Every industry has specific problems and customer service solutions; IT is no exception. Most IT businesses consistently use the latest technology to keep up with the trend. Hence, when adapting to the new technology, the company’s employees can sometimes face many IT-related issues. And would reach out to the support team. When these IT professionals reach out to the support team, what issues do they face the most in offering quality support? Let’s see.

Here are a few challenges that are faced by the IT support team daily:

• Managing overload of requests
• Taking long resolution times
• Recurring queries
• Handling time-consuming tasks

All these issues are why the IT support team cannot provide quality support. But, with the help of the best customer support software, all the challenges can be solved. It allows the support team to manage the requests easily with its one-page ticketing solution, tackle recurring issues with automation and canned responses, and work on cutting down on the long resolution and time-consuming tasks with the help of its other powerful feature. The IT industry can benefit greatly, as managing all the queries becomes relatively easy.

ii. E-commerce Industry

The E-commerce industry is a different business model, not unknown to customers anymore but a little different than other business models as it does not have any physical store for customers to visit and make the purchase. It is quite obvious that customers are going to reach out to the brand via mediums such as email, calls, social media platforms, etc. But, can eCommerce businesses offer their online customers the service of their expectations? The answer is that some are successful, while most businesses face a lot of challenges in order to do so.

Here are the challenges that eCommerce businesses face in offering quality service:

• Delivering an omnichannel customer experience
• Maintaining the loyalty of their customers
• Managing a large number of incoming customer queries
• Keeping the data of the customers safe

When purchasing a product from an online store, all the customer’s personal information is saved in the database. How often have we heard that cyber-attacks have breached such data? Keeping the customers’ data safe has to be the most difficult challenge for eCommerce businesses. But with the best customer support software, it can get easy. The data of the customers who reach out to your support teams gets saved in the secured data centers. Thus, breaching it gets difficult.

Now, if we talk about the other challenges of the eCommerce industry, customer support software can help you solve them as well. It can allow you to offer omnichannel support to cover all the channels from where customers reach out, offer customers quick solutions 24/7 to win their trust and loyalty, and manage all the requests easily so that no customer queries go missing. This way, for eCommerce businesses, customer support software can be a one-stop solution for their numerous challenges.

iii. Education Industry

As everything is getting digitalized, education is also a part of the trend. Online education has been a revolution. Hundreds or maybe thousands of online platforms are accessed by people all over the world to gain some kind of knowledge. Online education opens a wide range of choices.

For example, let’s say a student residing in Canada wants to learn about a particular course from a particular institute which is in the USA; he/she can easily grab the opportunity to do so with the help of online education. However, as this online education model is new for many students, it can raise many questions in their minds. And there is a high chance they would contact the support team.

Let’s see what are the challenges that the support team might face in the online education business:

• Not being able to provide 24/7 support
• Collecting student’s feedback
• Not offering self-serve options
• Not employing omnichannel support

These are the most critical challenges faced by the education industry’s support team. As we mentioned above, the students might want the opportunity to educate themselves at world-renowned institutes. And the student and the institute might be in different countries. This is where offering 24/7 support to the students is crucial.

Let’s say students from India want to learn a course from an American university; they need to be offered 24/7 support due to the difference in the time zones. Offering around-the-clock support has been the most critical challenge education institutes face.

But with the help of the best customer support software, this challenge can be tackled easily as it can allow the support teams to offer 24/7 support to the students by empowering them with self-service options. Students can solve their issues on their own. It also has a powerful omnichannel feature that helps it cover all the channels students use to reach out. The support team can also create valuable feedback forms and send them to the student for their opinion about online education and support.

iv. Insurance Industry

Insurance is of many types, and there won’t be a single household that does not have insurance. The insurance could be of anything, from their own health insurance to the insurance of their vehicles. This industry has been booming after the rise of the pandemic. According to a report, Global Gross Written Premium is expected to reach $5.8 trillion by 2026, growing 0.6% year-on-year according to the CAGR.

With the rise in the demand for various insurances, the demand for customer support is also increasing. As customers have many questions regarding the various insurances, the support teams are the only ones to whom they will reach out for some answers. For example, you are a customer who is looking for health insurance. You visited a website and discovered many companies offer it at the price you want. But you do not know which company’s insurance is the best, and the settlement rates are high. So, you reach out to the customer support department for guidance.

Similarly, there would be many other customers with the same issues or some customers with some other issues. The bottom line is that customer support teams have a lot on their plate to manage.

Let’s see what are the challenges that are faced by the insurance industry in offering quality support:

• Not offering self-service to customers
• Handling complex processes manually
• Providing excellent experiences at every touchpoint
• Not being able to cover all the channels

These challenges can keep the support team from offering the customer the needed service. But, by employing the best customer support software, they can easily overcome all these challenges and improve their customer’s experience. They can automate complex customer queries, provide omnichannel support, offer self-service to customers, etc. This way, the customer support team can easily help their customers; if they are not around, the customers can also help themselves.

The customers of insurance companies like personalized recommendations, so in order to improve their experience, the support teams can use features such as analytics and customer satisfaction feedback. These features help the support teams create personalized recommendations for the customers to make it easy for them to decide. This way, customer support software can not only help in offering quality service but also help enhance customers’ experience.

15 Best Customer Support Software of 2023

1. DeskXpand

DeskXpand is a customer support software with the USP of an intuitive one-page ticketing interface. It has been successfully revolutionizing the customer support of businesses of all sizes. Its powerful features make it one of the most effective and efficient customer support software. DeskXpand can allow the support teams to provide a unified experience across all channels, elevate self-service for customers to help themselves, get invaluable insights into the data, seamless collaboration between team members, etc. With its help, the support can enhance their productivity and offer quick customer service solutions to the customers. DeskXpand customer support software also has in-product security features to help you manage your data security challenges. Out and out, it is software that has powerful features that can help you easily transform your customer support, and that too at a low cost, as it is a cost-effective software that suits every business’s needs.

• One-page ticketing
• Self-service
• Omnichannel support
• Analytics
• Customization
• Canned responses
• Customer satisfaction survey
• Help widget & live chat
• Task Management
• Security
• Automation

DeskXpand’s Pricing

• DX Pro: $14
• DX Enterprise: Contact Sales Team

Free trial period: 14 days

2. Zendesk

Zendesk allows the customer support team to offer a great experience to their customers. With the help of Zendesk, support teams can effectively manage their email, Twitter, and Facebook conversations. The important thing to notice here is purchasing any Zendesk plan will allow the support teams to do so. Zendesk’s customer support software is mostly used to manage larger teams, but they also have some low-cost plans to cover the basics and focus more on offering email support. It also offers seamless flow across all the channels and enhances the productivity of agents and the satisfaction of the customers. Zendesk’s customer support software is easy to use and can be implemented quickly.

• Ticket routing
• Live chat software
• Knowledge base
• Tracking and reporting
• Self-service portal
• Community forums
• Automation

Zendesk’s Pricing

• Suite Team: $49
• Suite Growth: $79
• Suite Professional: $99
• Suite Enterprise: $150

Free trial period: 30 days

3. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer support software that provides the features of chatbots, self-service, automation, etc. It offers two support offerings: one is a help desk solution, and the other is an omnichannel solution. Omnichannel customer support solutions focus mainly on offering services on channels like email and all social media platforms. Businesses looking to offer omnichannel support can select this Freshdesk support tier. Freshdesk also offers AI responders and field service management tools, but these features can only be used in high-cost plans. Freshdesk can be a great software to streamline the customer support process and collaborate seamlessly with other team members.

• Ticket routing
• Live chat software
• Knowledge base
• API
• Tracking and reporting
• Self-service portal
• Community forums
• Automation
• Email ticketing

Freshdesk’s Pricing

• Free: $0
• Growth: $15
• Pro: $49
• Enterprise: $79

Free trial period: 21 days

4. HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot service hub is one of the best customer support software to connect with customers and build relationships. For small businesses, HubSpot’s customer service software is free, but if you need more tools, you can also upgrade to the HubSpot service hub. Its premium plans offer can help you build automatic workflows, product integration, offer contextual data, etc. Hence, HubSpot can be truly considered one of the best support software for mid-to-large businesses and corporate enterprises.

• Ticketing
• Live chat
• Chatbots
• Team email
• Conversations inbox
• Email templates
• Closed ticket reports

HubSpot Service Hub’s Pricing

• Free plan: Limited features
• Starter: $50
• Professional: $400
• Enterprise: $1,200

5. Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce is known as a sales CRM tool; it also offers Service Cloud, a customer support platform. It is mostly preferred by enterprise businesses due to its customizability. Salesforce Service Cloud also offers an integrated suite of apps for easily handling customer relationships. It can be a standout platform if your customer support team and the sales team need to work closely with each other. It also offers add-ons like field service and AI tools.

• Ticketing
• Self-service
• AI for customer service
• Automation
• Reporting
• Help Desk Management
• Lead Distribution
• Live Chat
• Third-Party Integrations

Salesforce Service Cloud’s Pricing

• Essentials: $25
• Professional: $75
• Enterprise: $150
• Unlimited: $300

Free trial period: 30 days

6. LiveAgent

LiveAgent can be the best suite for companies of all sizes, whether a startup or an enterprise. It gathers the communication from channels such as email, calls, and social media into a dashboard. LiveAgent is customizable and provides excellent automation. Using LiveAgent, the customer support teams can also seamlessly collaborate. It saves the agents’ time by simplifying the customer support process and helps them increase their productivity. Its gamification approach is what makes it different from other customer support software.

• Centralized inbox
• Real-time typing-view
• Robust reporting and data analytics tools
• Email ticketing
• Live chat
• Voice and video call
• Social media integration
• Gamification
• SLA management

LiveAgent’s Pricing

• Ticket: $15
• Ticket + Chat: $29
• All-inclusive: $49

Free trial period: 14 days

7. Help Scout

Help Scout Strives to make a positive impact on the customers and communities. It tends to go the extra mile to support an organization that shares its values. Help Scout is straightforward to use and consists of a simple design. It has a lot of potential for customization due to its API access and integration partnerships with top tools. It also focuses on providing a great experience to the customers and the support team.

• Email ticketing
• Live chat
• Customization
• Canned responses
• Seamless collaboration
• Customer feedback & micro-surveys
• Collision detection

Help Scout’s Pricing

• Standard: $20
• Plus: $35
• Companies: $60

Free trial period: 15 days

8. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is another company known for its CRM; it also tends to offer customer support software. It offers various features such as shared inbox, phone integration, live chat, etc. However, some of these features are only included in the highest-cost plan. As an added benefit, Zoho Desk also offers ticketing, automation, and performance reporting tools to help agents manage support activities effectively. It also has team management tools, such as time monitoring or time tracking, that are proven effective when used by larger teams.

• Email ticketing
• Predefined SLAs
• Multilingual help desk
• Social and community channels
• Public knowledge base
• Escalations
• Workflow and assignment rules

Zoho Desk’s Pricing

• Free: $0
• Standard: $10
• Professional: $17
• Enterprise: $30

Free trial period: 15 days

9. HappyFox

If we speak about customer support software, Happyfox can be considered one of the most competitive options out there. Due to its superior reporting features, it stands out from the other customer support software. It allows the support managers to analyze the NPS and CSAT and get insights into how well the agents perform. Not only can it benefit the customer support teams, but also the HR department and marketing teams can take its help for better results.

• Ticketing
• Knowledge base
• Canned actions
• Automation
• Reporting
• Task management
• Satisfaction survey

HappyFox’s Pricing

• Mighty: $29
• Fantastic: $49
• Enterprise: $69
• Enterprise Plus: $89

Free trial period: 14 days

10. Sprout Social

If you are looking to offer exceptional social media support, Sprout Social is the software that can do wonders for you. It is a social media management tool that helps support teams manage and monitor the queries and comments raised by customers on multiple social media platforms. So, it is the perfect choice for businesses running on social media. It helps your support team to be quick and efficient with its features, such as personalization, automation, seamless in-app collaboration, etc.

• Response management
• Collaboration
• Integrations
• In-app collaboration
• Reporting and analytics
• Automation
• Tracking and reporting
• Customer segmentation

Sprout Social’s Pricing

• Standard: $89
• Professional: $149
• Advanced: $249

Free trial period: 30 days

11. AirCall

AirCall is a cloud-based telephony software that services small and mid-sized businesses in 30 countries. It customizes the numbers for the customer care department and transfers the call automatically to the customer care representative. It offers call support to customers and employees via Aircall’s PC, Mac, or mobile app. What makes it ideal for large businesses is its availability for desktop applications. With the help of AirCall, the support teams can get phone support up and running quickly.

• Virtual call center
• Call routing
• Interactive voice response (IVR)
• Shared call inbox
• Call conferencing solution
• Analytics
• Integrations

AirCall’s Pricing

• Essentials: $30
• Professional: $50
• Custom

Free trial period: 7 days

12. LiveChat

LiveChat is a customer support software that businesses of all sizes can use. It is flexible and feature-rich software. LiveChat is also easy to integrate with other third-party apps/tools so that the agents can work more efficiently. It streamlines all customers’ messages into a shared inbox so everyone can easily access customer queries. The LiveChat apps are easy to use and work across mobile, desktop, and tablet devices.

• Canned responses
• Message sneak peek
• Multi-web support
• Ticket management
• Reporting
• Proactive chats
• Chat window translations

LiveChat’s Pricing

• Starter: $20
• Team: $41
• Business: $59
• Enterprise: Not mentioned

Free trial period: 14 days

13. Jira Service Desk

Atlassian developed Jira to make the collaboration effective between developers, operations, and IT. It is a project management tool mainly used by agile software development teams to track bugs. Jira can be used to assist customers as well as your employees. It consists of features similar to other support software in this list, such as shared inbox, live chat, self-service, automation, etc. Jira also has specialized tools designed for incident and asset management.

• Conversational ticketing
• Self-service portal
• Collaboration
• SLAs
• Reporting and metrics
• Incident and asset management
• Ticket routing
• Live chat software
• Native integrations

Jira Service Desk’s Pricing

• Free: $0
• Standard: $20
• Premium: $45
• Enterprise: Custom

Free trial period: 7 days

14. Slack

Businesses use Slack as a communication and team collaboration tool for internal and external communication. However, it can also be used as a customer support channel. With multiple integrations available, it can also be paired with other customer support software. Powerful AI features of Slack make it easy to find documents and past conversations with customers easily and quickly, saving customers a lot of time. Being cost-effective is also one reason you can use it for your business.

• Instant messaging
• Voice and video call
• Screen sharing
• Conferencing
• Mobile app

Slack’s Pricing

• Free plan: Available
• Pro: $7.25
• Business+: $12.50
• Enterprise grid: Not mentioned

15. Groove

Groove is an email-based support software used as an alternative to the shared inbox by small businesses. As it comes with a knowledge base, it can reduce the number of incoming queries. Hence, businesses with small customer support teams can benefit greatly from using Groove. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can be easily integrated with Groove so that customer support teams can be on top of every single customer query. For businesses that want to offer self-service, Groove offers knowledge base themes that are customizable, beautifully designed, and mobile responsive.

• Shared inbox
• Seamless collaboration
• Reporting and analytics
• Knowledge base
• Social media integrations

Groove’s Pricing

• Basic: $50
• Pro: $250
• Advanced: $650
• Enterprise: Custom

Free trial period: 30 days

How to choose the most appropriate customer support software for your business?

With its powerful features, customer support software is used to streamline the complex customer support process. Hence, selecting the most appropriate customer support software becomes very crucial. Apart from streamlining the process, the right customer support software helps the service department manage the tickets easily and enhances productivity.

Let’s see what factors to consider when selecting the most appropriate customer support software for your business:

• Determine your business’s operational requirements
• Compare the pricing of all customer support software
• Identity customer-preferred communication channels
• Assess the features of the customer support software
• Keep the software’s scalability in mind
• Does the software offer a personalization option
• Look if it offers a free trial or a free demo

Once you get answers to all your questions, then and only then, make a decision, as you will select software that will change how you offer customer support and enhance your customers’ experience. It will be the extra help your customer support team needs to streamline the workflow. In short, do not rush, and keep all the things in mind while making a decision.