Customer Support Tools: 7 Advantages and Disadvantages

Larger companies have more (much, much more) than one person in their customer support team.

To ensure the success of every customer contact, it is important to keep tabs on tasks and questions.

However, many companies fail to see the advantages of implementing communication tools like Zendesk, Groove or Desk. Personally, looking through our own customer contact, I have found more advantages rather than disadvantages to this type of conversation with consumers.

Advantages

1. It helps in organizing all customer support work. With more than one person working in customer service, it is easier to handle tickets, assign them, and then go back and check them when you can see when and who answered. It allows for smoother communication not only with the customer, but also within the company itself.
2. Its ability to keep track of history of all conversations. Communication tools allow you to not only see when someone replied, but also what they wrote for future reference. If a customer feels like something was not handled or he did not receive an answer, when in fact he did, you can revert back to the history to help out your customer.
3. It provides insights into the effectiveness of your customer support. You can measure virtually anything from response time, net promoter score, reports, all the way to notifications. The ability to see the way your support team responds will give you insight into what needs to be worked on to improve the quality of your customer care.
4. Its ease when it comes to integrating with other tools. A great example of integrating is CRM (Customer Relationship Management), where you can automate and organize all your sales, marketing, customer and technical service in one place.
5. It helps keeping tabs of all communication. Not just the history and who responded when. These type of tools will keep all email, telephone, and even social media conversations in one place so that nothing gets lost.

Disadvantages

1. These type of tools tend to make conversations feel more formal. Not all customers may feel comfortable in this type of environments. Most people still prefer old fashioned emails, as these make them feel as if someone is quicker to respond in a more human way.
2. Budget might be an issue. Not all small companies have the financial ability to provide this type of communication system in their business.

With so many advantages and only a few disadvantages, I can only conclude that communication tools make customer service more effective. Even things that might seem like obstacles (financial status or formality of these tools), can be worked on.

In order to improve your business, I highly recommend to invest in this type of a solution.