The majority of your support tickets are just emails, and Help Scout's Gmail-style interface and keyboard shortcuts keep that in focus. Yearly (Save 34%) Standard. First, the customer has to actually be able to find answers to their questions. With so many great apps, how can you pick the one that's best for your needs? There's live chat to help customers in real time, mobile apps to help customers on the go, and more. You can even offer real-time support with Freshdesk's live chat widget on your site. "Zapier is a great tool for getting new workflows up and running with minimal effort," says Disqus product support manager Daniel Matteson. So don't be afraid to experiment—after all, your support team will have to use the app you pick all day, every day for the foreseeable future. It's designed to enable you to help your customers wherever they are, with support for tools to add chat, SMS, and much more—along with CRMs, forms, and other tools that can add extra data to your support tickets. Wonder how much time your most difficult support tickets take to answer? And team inbox apps often include advanced features, like canned replies, keyboard shortcuts, and other tricks and tools to improve your response time. There, you can sort through the messages, assign them to the correct team member, and make sure everyone gets a reply. Something that seems to be a difficult question might be much easier to solve if you saw the customer's previous interactions with rest of your team. It's easy for support apps to become bloated with tools for a dozen different support-related tasks—but what if you want just a simple way to answer your customer's questions? If you're stumped by an issue, these tools let you assign tickets to other team members, too. You'll need to loop in the right people, and make sure everyone follows through and closes the ticket. Every desktop solution. And once you've answered support emails for a while, you'll be able to identify other common problems you should address in your documentation. I've been using wunderlist, then trello, but both lack the knowledge base part and get cluttered very easily. But calls can also let you dig deeper into issues, since you can ask questions and get detailed replies instantly. Live chat is a quicker way to solve problems and answer questions, and it's often included as an extra tool in more advanced customer support apps. Tender Support Price: From $9/month Starter plan for basic support and 1 user; $20/month for each additional user. And, most incredibly, it lets you build a full support center for free. But sometimes, it's nice to have an app designed for your computer, and Kayako offers that for almost every device. Answering support tickets well without knowing the full context is difficult at best. Want to find support tickets from users who've purchased your product more than a year ago, and also used your trial before purchasing? “Zapier is the extra team member at our agency linking our systems together and managing the push and pull of data.”. On top of that, we create various resources ourselves by documenting issues, submitting bug reports, writing notes, creating documentation, and many others. Like the cliché goes, we started Obsidian because Erica couldn't find anything that can satisfy her need to build a personal knowledge base. Figuring out where to focus your support attention is difficult. Instead of sending your team a private email, a forum encourages your customer to publicly post. It's one of the cheapest ways to get your support center off the ground, without leaving behind any of the features you'd expect from a multi-channel support app. In the next chapter, we'll take a look at the very best live chat apps for customer support. It's one thing to see a graph of your support traffic, but quite another to quickly find out that you've had 100 more emails today than on average. When making your decision, consider these seven most popular customer support tools: team inbox, knowledge base, forum, social, chat, phone, and mobile support. With the help of Hygger, you may discover such powerful ways to set priorities as: What's the best personal productivity + knowledge base app. -Value vs Risk matrix UserEcho helps you keep that in focus. Team inboxes also let you bring in emails from multiple addresses, so you can answer your support@yourcompany.com and billing@yourcompany.com questions together. Here are some popular integrations to help you get started: Many support tools include their own support form so customers can get in touch with your team from your website. Add the app's support widget to your site, and customers can chat with your team in real-time. for 1 user; $20/mo. Zapier, with a Google Sheets connection, proved to be the solution. If you just need to offer email support or build help documentation for your users, almost any app in this chapter would work fine. Typically, contributors who are well versed in the relevant subjects add to and expand the knowledge base. If you have customers, you need customer support software. With lables and attachments, you can easily sort your materials (notes, receipes, etc.) Finding the right email to focus on is simple with Snappy's Lenses features, which are filters that help you find emails about specific topics, emails assigned to someone in particular, or customers have for too long been awaiting a reply. out. Guru is a collaborative knowledge management solution where answers find you--everywhere, every time. A team inbox sounds like a great idea, but it's still hard to not wish you could just answer all of your emails right from your personal email inbox. Its support interface helps you stay on top of everything. But that's probably a bit too extreme for personal use + no there's no knowledge base part. LiveAgent allows you to create a single or multi knowledge base with ease. Designed to make it easy for you to better support your customers, these apps bring emails, tweets, chat messages and more into a customer support command center. Support apps with social media integrations bring your Twitter mentions, Facebook messages and more right into your team inbox, so you can see those problems that otherwise might go unnoticed. But what else do you need? You can send a quick, Markdown-formatted reply there, or open the message for a full look at their email, previous requests, and more. Submit a Ticket . Then, if you want to add a social network integration, chat, phone support, or tie in Zoho CRM, you can upgrade to a paid account. It can fulfill your need regarding 'knowledge base'. Some tickets take just a quick reply, but others might take hours to solve. She has tried all kinds of software from TiddlyWiki to TheBrain; nothing felt right though. Disqus employs a support forum to let customers help one another. Either way, you'll get a record of phone conversations alongside your other support requests. It's a quicker way to work on a short list of tickets. Single note can be placed into multiple places in the tree (see cloning) Or, if you've already found the app you need for customer support, jump ahead to chapter 8 to learn how to use your support app's best features to support your customers faster. As you shift focus from topic to topic, TheBrain moves right along with you, showing your information and all the connections you've made. It takes time up front, but it’s worth it. With the easy editor, it is a breeze to edit articles that helps you to deliver quick, conclusive responses to customers’ most pressing issues. The personal knowledge base is basically a wiki system for personal use. These and other Zaps can help you out. But it also can help your team from burning out, by letting each support team member set their own schedule and keep new tickets from coming into their queue while out of office. The data in your knowledge base can come from anywhere. As part of the Salesforce family of apps, Desk shows your CRM data alongside tickets if you're a Salesforce user, and it logs support questions back to a contact's profile in your CRM. Without further ado, here's an overview of the top 20 customer support apps—first, the simple support ticket systems, then the more feature-filled multi-channel support apps. ... We want you to know how Spiceworks, Inc. processes your Personal Information. HappyFox include a time tracking tool right inside its team inbox, to see how long it takes to answer each email. Only then will they be able to send you a message, helpfully cutting down on repetitive questions you'd otherwise have to field. You can use Zapier to connect your favorite apps and add extra features to your support tool. A team inbox simplifies all that. We've since developed more tools to help on this front, but coming up with that first workflow in Zapier gave us a head start. Most of all, a knowledge base should build upon itself to coalesce into an educational archive that’s accessible and practical. Instead of asking extra questions and waiting for more information, your team will be able to solve problems with the first reply. Back on Groove, you'll find a complete log of what everyone has accomplished, along with features like automation and saved common replies to speed up your work. Zapier is the easiest way to automate powerful workflows with more than 2,000 apps. -Weighted scoring framework. Hygger.io is one of the best tools for increasing and tracking productivity because the platform allows applying a great set of prioritization frameworks. ... (Personal Knowledge Management) tools are that it uses Markdown files rather than outlines/blocks, and that it is locally stored instead of hosted. And as you're working, you can let your team know your status on the Wall, an internal social network just for your support team. All of your messages are delivered to one place, where each member of your team can log in and see the emails. How can I update my personal details? It's an email-focused support app—without a help center—that gives you a centralized inbox for every email your team needs to handle. New emails flow into your inbox and refresh automatically, so you'll always be on top of the freshest tickets. Build your own custom new features with a spreadsheet or database, or help your team celebrate when the support queue is empty—these Zaps will take a bit more creativity, but they're also incredibly powerful. UserVoice Price: From $15/month per user Standard plan for core support features; from $499/month Basic plan for project management features. Each of these apps goes far beyond the basics of handling support. Freshdesk includes phone support that turns calls into tickets, HappyFox helps you offer mobile support with its HelpStack feature, All Hands Support: Why Everyone–Even Executives–Should Spend Time in Customer Service, The 9 Help Desk Metrics that Should Guide Your Customer Support, 4 Rules of Improv and How They Relate to Customer Support, Support Your Customers Better and Faster: Lessons from the Pros at Trello, HubSpot and Disqus, How to Build an Effective Support Knowledge Base: Everything You Need to Know about Documentation, How to Collect Customer Feedback That’s Actually Valuable, Start Preventing Fires: How to Implement Proactive Customer Support, The Top 7 Features of Customer Support Apps, Support Ticket Systems versus Multi-Channel Support Apps, Pick the Best Customer Support Tool for Your Team, Add Custom Features to Your Customer Support Tool, Basic plan for project management features, the very best live chat apps for customer support, how to use your support app's best features to support your customers faster, a cost efficient, easy-to-use help system, From $9/mo. Turn Your Notes App Into a Personal Knowledge Base — Tiago Forte on Building a Second Brain. Looking for a full-featured support app—one that can manage your support emails, social networking mentions, phone calls or text messages? It's a forum-focused support tool where your users can ask for new features, add comments and thoughts about them, and upvote their favorite ideas. You just might have to try a few on and see which works best for your team. That's where Zapier app integrations come in. Adding Apps using Browser Extensions The OneLogin Browser Extensions can prompt you to add an app to your Company or Personal app catalog when you log into the app. Here's some quick tips to help you decide: Each of these support tools are dependable, and will each help keep your support inbox under control. Freshdesk makes it easy to decide, with built-in service level agreement (SLA) policies that make sure you prioritize support the way you intend. If so, you'd opt for a support ticket system—it's not full-featured, but what it does, it does well. It's a simple, easy-to-use support tool, with the power you need to quickly answer questions without feeling overwhelmed. With their own support tool, they needed a way to keep track of spam messages that were coming in. HappyFox pulls Twitter conversations into the team inbox. You can solve their problems and answer questions, while prioritizing the most important new features for your development roadmap at the same time. A personal knowledge base is what I always wanted, but nothing was living up to my needs. And … Mobile support tools include code to add your documentation, live chat, and email support inside your mobile apps, so assistance is only a Help button away. "- Daniel Matteson, Product Support Manager, Disqus. If you sell products online, or have an email newsletter, you likely know your customers' email addresses already. for Salesforce integration and tabbed interface. Here are over 20 of the best customer service apps that keep your support ticket queue under control and your sanity intact. Jobs at TeamViewer . If you already have a web form on your site, though, you might want to keep using it instead. It's free for personal use or as a trial version for business users. Ever need to switch between emails as you work out a solution—perhaps answering a simpler question while thinking over a hard one, or working on multiple similar tickets at the same time? When something is broken, the first action we take is to open Twitter or Facebook and either complain or ask for help. Deskero helps you find out by monitoring social networks right alongside your support requests. LiveAgent is focused on real-time support, with a live chat widget for your site and SLAs to ensure you provide on-time support to your best customers. "It provided us a quick and easy way to get this spam data into a Google sheet, allowing us to start taking bulk action on these reports. UserEcho Price: $15/month per user for full features. Mojo Helpdesk includes a number of features to help you solve every issue on time. They'll also be able to help you know how well your support is doing, through a Net Promoter Score survey at the bottom of your messages. Modern Slavery Act . Read the Zapier blog for tips on productivity, automation, and growing your business. ‪InfoRapid‬. osTicket Price: Free open source edition to run on your own servers; from $9/month per user hosted edition, You can use Zapier's MySQL Integrations to connect osTicket to your other apps. It can import existing support tickets from Zendesk and Desk, and its reports let you export your HappyFox contacts, tickets and more in spreadsheet formats. And, you can set it up to send emails through a transactional email service to make sure your emails always get delivered. Then, it pulls all of a customer's chats, emails, billing, logs and more together whenever they get in touch, so you'll know exactly how to solve their problems. Install Trilium Notes from the App Store with a single click. Changelog . But perhaps you want something extra—a special feature to help you offer better support? Share and collaborate on work with your team in Zapier. Videos . Simple. Your customers' happiness with your support team is likely linked to how fast you reply—and if you really solve their problems. Much like the Help menu in your favorite programs, a knowledge base is where you publish documentation about pricing, features, services, frequent problems, and anything else you want to share about your app or business. Hire a Zapier Expert to help you improve processes and automate workflows. Kayako Price: $29/month per user Case plan for email and basic features; from $49/month per user for live chat and calls, for tracking time spent on support tickets. Either one person would have to answer every email, or you'd have to share the account password with every employee—not the most secure option. Nowadays, we all face with too much fragmented information. These answered questions live on in public, where others can find the solutions without reaching out to your team. Since the help tool is inside the app, it'll be easier to help customers as most mobile support tools also capture info about the user's device, what part of the app they were using, and more. SupportBee Price: From $49/month Startup plan for unlimited users and up to 1,000 tickets, for timing replies and tracking happiness. Desk Price: $3/month Starter plan for 3 users; from $30/month per user Standard plan for basic support and knowledge base features. 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