7 Best Customer Service Apps to Create Lasting Customer Relationships

A business without customers is like a car without an engine: it’s going nowhere. Serving your customers well is the crux of any business, and your ability to deliver on what you promise your customers is what differentiates you from your competitors.

Just like servicing a car engine, you’ll need to the right tools for the job. A good customer service app can mean the difference between an excellent customer experience and a level of service that grinds your business to a halt - you don’t want to end up on the next list of customer service horror stories!

Here are seven top customer service apps that can help you ensure that your customer’s journey through your business is as smooth and enjoyable as can be. The list is based on the best customer service apps identified in GetApp’s GetRank quarterly ranking system of top business software.

Is there enough ‘Zen’ within your customer service department? Choose Zendesk and you can be at peace with your customers, treating them to the high quality service that they deserve.

Zendesk, which topped the Q1 2015 GetRank report, is very easy to use, even for the first-time SaaS customer service app user. Add to that great customization options and robust language support, and it’s easy to see why Zendesk is so popular with businesses of all sizes.

Zendesk already services more than 40,000 businesses worldwide, including the likes of Vodafone, Shopify, and Groupon. The app can be scaled for use by as many customer service representatives as your business demands.

Help Scout is a cloud-based customer service app that focuses on conversations. It’s an email-based help desk solution where you can manage multiple inboxes, tracking all conversations with customers and assisting team collaboration.

Help Scout is about conversations rather than ticket numbers. The ethos is that customers feel like they’re being listened to rather than being just another number in a long waiting list.

Features of the app include an integrated knowledge base for creating step-by-step tutorials and articles, real-time reporting, and Gmail filter-style ‘workflows’ for automating responses to customer enquiries. There’s also a ‘collision detection’ feature that sends an alert if two staff members are working on the same task.

Salesforce.com’s Desk.com is among the best customer service apps around. Developed by Salesforce, the biggest name in online CRM software, the solution gives owners of small and medium-sized businesses the ability to outsource their customer service needs.

Desk.com is a multi-channel customer service app that makes fielding requests via email, social media, phone, and online chat easy. With Desk.com, you can add agents as needed to scale in accordance with customer demand.

Desk.com has the ability to nurture relationships by tapping into what Salesforce does best-customer history and other data. Its performance dashboards allow you to get a simple overview of your entire customer service operation, allowing you to easily determine where customers aren’t being dealt with effectively.

Billed as “a customer engagement infrastructure,” UserVoice gives you the power to understand your customers’ relationships with your business.

UserVoice is in use by more than 160,000 organizations around the world, and prides itself on its customer satisfaction features. You can use the software to view satisfaction ratings of customers over the previous 30 days, and the app even gives you tips on how to improve these ratings.

It also includes features such as crowd-sourced user insights, for getting feedback on product development from your customers; and ‘Instant Answers’, which allows users to clear up their questions by tapping into your knowledge base.

Customer service is a collaborative customer support app that encourages teams to work together effectively in order to meet the demands of your customers.

TeamSupport allows you to create customer service portals that can operate out of hours. These portals help customers to help themselves (and each other) to resolve their problems and find answers to their questions.

TeamSupport brings self-help ticketing, live chat, ticket management and automation, and reporting and analytics together in a package aimed largely at the business-to-business sector, though potentially helpful to all types of businesses.

Freshdesk helps you gamify your customer service activities. It features a user-friendly ticketing system with a simple user interface.

Freshdesk brings multi-channel customer support into one package with website-based, email, social, mobile, and chat-based customer support ticketing. The app has solid self-service ticketing built right in, and offers a range of customization features, allowing you you to brand your various customer support portals our own logos and themes, and even code (CSS and Javascript).

Freshdesk delivers advanced reporting, including a time-tracking tool that allows your agents to record the time they spend working on support tasks.

Cayzu takes the strain out of dealing with customer requests across multiple channels such as web, email, Twitter, Facebook, etc. It’s an easy-to-use ticketing system that allows the support team to collaborate more simply.

Real-time reporting in Cayzu allows your business to monitor the effectiveness of your helpdesk activities. You can easily view the number of tickets received in a given time frame along with stats such as the number of open/resolved tickets, average response time from agents, and average number of customer interactions.

Cayzu also includes a brandable end-user knowledge so you can assist your customers in finding out answers to their own questions.

GetApp has an extensive list of head-to-head comparisons of customer service apps, as well as a complete list of customer service apps, with links to free trials, full reviews and downloads.

This post was originally published on May 22nd, 2014 and has been edited to reflect the results of the Q1 2015 GetRank customer service app ranking system.