7 Tools to Provide Impeccable Customer Support at Times of COVID-19 Outbreak

The COVID-19 outbreak has affected countries across the globe. From the developed first world nations of Europe and America to emerging third world nations across Asia and Africa, it’s almost as if the entire world has reached a standstill. Consequently, all businesses had to shut down their brick-and-mortar address.

Shutting down these businesses has brought a significant overall impact. These shops still play a major role in the economy, and as such, anything that affects them affects the economy as well.

Even though things appear dark for physical stores, all hope is not lost. Digital marketing has not been more lucrative than now. Now is the perfect time for companies that haven’t gone digital to take this plunge finally. For the companies that made the transition, now is the perfect time to step up to the challenge in front of them.

The Challenge for Online Stores

In an arena where millions of companies vie for the attention of customers, how do you stand out? The answer is paradoxical, easy, and hard. Impeccable customer service is the solution, but providing it is the real challenge.

At a time where you can’t have your support team in-house to manage high volumes of customer support requests, digital customer support tools can prove beneficial.

We have curated the top 7 customer support tools that you should utilize to help both your customers and your support team during this Covid-19 outbreak.

Here are our top picks: 7 Customer Support Tools in COVID 19

1) ProProfs Survey Maker

Understanding your customers’ pain points is the first step to serving your customers better. Once you know what works and what doesn’t work with your customers, you can improve them.

Getting this knowledge involves interacting with your customers in an environment where they feel comfortable talking to you. This is where online surveys can help you.

ProProfs Survey Maker is a robust tool that will allow you to create customer surveys within minutes. It also provides you over 100 professionally made survey templates that you can send to your customers and add to the importance of customer experience.

You can create different types of surveys, including in-app surveys, popup surveys, NPS surveys, and quizzes. The surveys can be customized to your brand logo and colors. The advanced reporting features provide you with presentation-ready reports for you to study and analyze.

ProProfs Survey Maker can be integrated with a suite of other marketing and support tools, making it a comprehensive package for business organizations.

2) Qualaroo

How would you like to gather insights from your customers about the page they are visiting? Say you’re running a successful blog and want to know from your customers about the topics they would be interested in reading or just about a particular blog in general. Qualaroo allows you to do this exactly.

Qualaroo is another customer support tool that helps you to create customer surveys. It allows you to conduct customer surveys at any point in the customer journey. This is especially helpful when you want to conduct instantaneous pulse checks.

Qualaroo provides users with detailed reports and analytics to get better insights into the pulse of their customers. All the surveys created using Qualaroo are optimized for all devices and operating systems, thus ensuring seamless support irrespective of the medium.

Qualaroo can also be integrated with popular CRM and other marketing tools, making it extremely versatile and handy for the brands that use it.

3) Bitrix24

This current pandemic situation has forced all brands to incorporate work from home policy. Ensuring seamless workflow and collaboration amongst remote teams can prove to be challenging for companies that haven’t always had a remote workforce.

Bitrix24 is a collaboration tool you can use to ensure proper task management, collaboration, and communication during this lockdown period.

Bitrix24 gives you an integrated platform for all your tasks, messages, contacts files, and projects. With this tool, you can delegate the task to team members and effortlessly keep a track on team activities. The tool also supports team collaboration via file sharing and chat.

The core solutions generally comprise document management, social network, file sharing, HR management, CRM, email management, calendar, and planning, sales team management, and telephone management.

Bitrix24 is optimized to work for all devices and operating systems, making it easier for your support agents to respond to customer requests.

4) Zingtree

Customers usually prefer calling a customer support operator only if they cannot find the solution themselves. During this COVID-19 outbreak, utilizing the Zingtree tool can make it super-easy to build and preserve interactive troubleshooters and process flows with minimal to no coding.

Zingtree makes it easy for your support agents to guide anyone visiting your website by creating a decision tree that can be navigated easily. This automated decision tree can be used to guide the customers towards solutions they most commonly look for.

This not only reduces the time spent by your operators on repeated questions but it also makes your website more accessible for a first time user. Furthermore, it also provides your support team with comprehensive analytics on how your decisions are being used to guide process optimizations, service, or product.

Zingtree can be integrated with different helpdesk and CRM tools like Freshdesk and salesforce. Zingtree follows a plug and play format, thus ensuring that even a first time user with absolutely no prior experience in coding can add it to their website.

5) Hootsuite

Social media has become a major part of every brand’s customer support strategy. Often, customers prefer to air out their dissatisfaction with a particular product or service over social media.

Like Jeff Bezos once said, “If you disappoint a customer in real life, they tell six people, if you disappoint them on social media, they tell six thousand.” It is only obvious that you also get a tool that can help you stay on top of all your social media mentions and discussions.

Hootsuite has built its reputation as one of the best customer service tools of the digital age, and that reputation is not undeserved. It comes with a geo-search feature that helps you track conversations within a particular geographic location.

Hootsuite also aggregates all your mentions across different social platforms, making it easier for you to track and manage multiple conversations at once. You can also respond to customer mentions and requests directly from the Hootsuite dashboard.

All of these are just additional features on top of the main USP. Hootsuite allows users to schedule and curate content for social media posts. It also helps users measure the ROI on their social media campaigns.

From a single user plan up to a personalized enterprise account, you can choose a plan as per your business needs.

6) Deskero

Deskero is an effective customer engagement tool for organizations requiring a helpdesk and ticketing software. The tool facilitates users to engage and interact with their customers in a meaningful manner. Deskero collects service requests from all channels, including emails, APIs, and social media platforms on one dashboard.

Deskero provides an efficient ticket management system loaded with amazing features such as automated ticketing, reporting, service notifications, email import/export, multi-channel support, etc. Not only this, but it also offers users to customize the theme, font, etc. of the dashboard, according to their liking.

Deskoro is ideal for small and medium businesses with a customer support team that handles large numbers of text-based requests.

7) Zoom

In this lockdown phase, Zoom has emerged as a real lifeline, especially for individuals and small businesses. It is the new virtual meeting room for organizations. Zoom is a free tool for customer support that unifies cross-platform group, video conferencing, and simple online meetings into one integrated platform.

Participants can connect on Zoom, via web conference, or through standard text chats as well. Zoom allows users to create virtual chat rooms and invite as many participants as desired.

During a video call, Zoom allows users to share their screens for better interaction and collaboration. The video can also be recorded and shared with others who were unable to join the meeting.

Organizations can use Zoom to get in touch with their customers, especially in cases where being able to view the customers’ screen could help provide a quicker solution.

Zoom has already shown its effectiveness as a meeting room across all industries. Whether it’s corporations holding their weekly team meetings, or teachers delivering lectures to their students, Zoom has endless potential and should definitely be a part of your customer support strategy to stay connected remotely.

Final Thoughts

No one knows how long the Covid-19 outbreak is going to affect business across the globe. For most brick and mortar businesses, this extended lockdown may or may not be a breaking point. Change is the only constant, and now is the perfect time for brands to finally embrace the idea of going digital.

These seven tools mentioned in the article are just a few of the many tools available to brands to choose from. The most crucial objective for all organizations during this lockdown is to be able to retain the quality and standard of service they were providing before the Covid-19 outbreak.

These tools are certainly not the definite arsenal to do that, but they sure are a start, and as an organization, making these tools a part of your customer support strategy will only benefit you.

Employing any or all these tools will help brands build lasting relationships with their customers and come out of this enforced shut down as a versatile brand.