10 Web-Based Customer Service Tools Your Small Business Should Be Using

There are quite a few customer service tools available to entrepreneurs
 who want to streamline that ever-so important part of their business.

Customer service can be a crucial asset when it comes to increasing revenue. If your customer service is lacking, people may go elsewhere. If it's great, you can retain customers for life. This is why using customer service tools can be essential to a business.

Here are 10 web-based customer service tools that your business could be using to help streamline and improve your customer service approach.

1. Zendesk

Customer service software often starts with a help-desk solution. A help desk is software designed to collect, assign and track communication about the product or customer. Help-desk software can be used for support, internal communication and many other things.

How often do you get emails from people asking questions about how your product works? Instead of wasting time typing the same emails over and over, consider using a knowledge-base system like Zendesk.

Zendesk allows you to create knowledge bases quickly, allowing you to create FAQs, user guides and other important information for people who have your product. This saves you time when you can point people towards the knowledge base in a support email or, better yet, they find the answer on their own.

A knowledge base isn't just for your current customers, it's also helpful for prospective customers. People making purchases are more likely to research the product thoroughly before buying. There may be a good chance these potential buyers are looking for a product that solves a very specific problem or has a specific feature—knowledge bases can help you make those features easier to discover.

2. Intercom Acquire Live Chat

If you sell a digital product, you're probably keenly aware of your cart abandonment rate, and may be struggling with reducing it.

The Baymard Web Usability Institute compiled 34 different studies and found the average cart abandonment rate was 68.8 percent. (The rate was last updated in October 2016.) Or, put another way: for every 10 people shopping online that have added a product into their shopping cart, only three people may actually buy it.

Shopping cart abandonment happens for a slew of reasons, and each reason can be different for each customer. Was there not enough information? Was the sales copy confusing? Did the product not have a specific feature that the buyer desperately needed?

Customer service can be a crucial asset when it comes to increasing revenue.
If your customer service is lacking, people may go elsewhere.

You can be proactive against shopping cart abandonment by using a live chat service like Intercom Acquire. Intercom Acquire allows you to initiate a conversation with a potential buyer via website chat. You can ask if they have questions, or give them an opportunity to ask you right there on the page. If you're not available to chat, you can capture leads to follow up with when you're back online.

Live chat can be instrumental to the sales process because it allows buyers to ask questions right there, without leaving your site. Prospective buyers can be hard (and expensive) to get back. Engaging in a helpful conversation before they leave can be a great way to retain some of those lost sales.

3. Uservoice

Feedback can be vital for your company. Are there bugs you're not seeing? Is your product behaving the way it's supposed to? Or maybe you need to know what product to build next. A great way to figure that out is by asking.

Uservoice is a feedback solution that allows site owners to add feedback forms directly on their website. The forms allow you to ask for ratings of your service, as well as a way to allow customers to submit product ideas.

4. Salesforce

Salesforce is the granddaddy of online customer relationship management (CRM) software. It can essentially be a one-stop shop for running the customer side of your business.

Some examples of Salesforce's capabilities? You can automatically send emails when a stage of a deal is done, store confidential documents, browse and collect leads and more. In fact, it has thousands of apps across nearly every industry, so you can get incredibly specialized in finding a CRM workflow for your specific needs.

5. Groove

Groove calls itself “simple help desk software." The software allows you to pull in emails, live chats, social media posts and calls into a ticketing system, which can help you organize your support requests.

Groove also provides a knowledge base solution that helps businesses compile helpful information about their product or service.

6. Freshdesk

Because help desks and ticketing systems are so vital to customer support, I'm going to tell you about one more: Freshdesk.

Freshdesk has a robust ticketing service that allows individuals or teams to pull in all sorts of support requests from different channels: email, phone, social networks and live chat. Another key aspect of Freshdesk is the ability to use automation dispatch tickets. This automation can help cut down the amount of tickets that have to be manually sorted.

7. CloudApp

There's that old saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words." That saying could be updated to say “a screenshot is worth a thousand-word support email."

CloudApp is a service that helps you easily take screenshots on your computer and share them with your team. You can quickly show other members in your team what you're seeing on your computer, or you could share that screenshot with a customer in a support request.

8. ScreenConnect

Sometimes sharing an image of what you're seeing isn't enough in a support scenario. Sometimes you need to be inside the customer's computer.

ScreenConnect is a service that gives you the ability to connect to a customer's computer and fix problems remotely. You log in to ScreenConnect, and once the person needing support gives you access, you can then securely access their computer. ScreenConnect offers compatibility with any device or platform, which means you can remotely access your customer's phones, tablets or computers—with their permission, of course.

9. Adobe Sign

Here's something that annoys everyone with a business: having to send faxes. But contracts have to be signed, and a common (and cumbersome) way to send them is by fax machine.

Adobe Sign lets you sidestep the fax machine altogether and just use email. You can fill out the form using Adobe Reader, and sign the document with an e-signature, which is 100 percent legal and secure. Then a copy of the signed document is sent to both parties, allowing you to go back to working on something much more important than remembering how to work the fax machine.

10. Slack

Slack is a messaging app for teams that's like a more powerful Google Chat. You can send direct messages or have a chat room. These messages are indexed and searchable, and can be tagged and sorted.

If you work on a collaborative team, Slack could be helpful in cutting down email. Slack's internal data compiled March 2016 says that they've reduced internal email by nearly 49 percent, reduced meetings by 25 percent and improved team productivity by 32 percent.

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6 Reasons Why Your Website Should Have a Blog

Blogs can take time and money, but the effort may be worth the increase in leads and customer engagement.

As a busy small-business owner, you may wonder if it's worth the time and effort to maintain a blog on your website.

If you want to increase the visibility and credibility of your company to consumers, you might consider regularly posting quality content on your website that will be interesting and useful to them. A blog is where this content may be housed, whether or not you call this section of your website a blog. On many sites, the “blog” has a different label, such as News, Press or Articles.

Here are six reasons why your small business website should consider a blog.

1. Drive traffic to your website.

In addition to the ROI a website with a blog may generate, websites with blogs may be able to get more traffic than websites without blogs. How do blogs drive all this additional traffic?

Good SEO results are largely driven by new content and relevant keywords, which means fresh content and a place to house it. Blogs provide you with the platform to do just that. Adding fresh content to your website may help it place higher in search engine results than other websites, which could make it more likely to get clicked.

„Adding a blog to your small-business website may just make sense. With minimal expense and effort, you can boost search engine rankings, build credibility, increase website traffic and foster relationships with customers.”

2. Convert traffic into leads.

Now that your website is getting more traffic, you have the opportunity to convert that traffic into leads. Each new piece of content may give you the opportunity to generate leads, and the way to do that may be by adding a call-to-action to each blog post. Try offering something that consumers will give up their contact information for, such as a free e-book, free webinar, free consultation or quote. Once you have their contact information, your sales team can follow up with those leads.

3. Become an authority.

The best small-business blogs can answer potential customers' common questions and discuss industry trends. If potential customers view your blog as one that can provide helpful information about relevant topics, they may be more likely to do business with you than with your competitors. Interesting and unique content can also give you the opportunity to drive traffic to your website through inbound links. 

4. Build relationships with potential customers.

The comments section on your blog may be a place on your website where you can have a two-way discussion with consumers. Encouraging engagement on your blog might be as simple as asking questions at the end of a post to get the conversation going, waiting for readers to leave comments and then interacting with those readers. By responding to your readers’ comments, you have the opportunity to build trust and gain insight into what your customers are looking for.

5. Boost your social media efforts.

Blog content can be perfect for sharing on social media. When you create original content that's valuable, interesting and entertaining to your target demographic, you may be more likely to get social shares. An added benefit: Unlike posting curated content on your social channels, content that's shared from your blog will point directly back to your website.

You can also add social sharing buttons to your blog so visitors can easily share your content—potentially turning your readers into your own grassroots marketing team.

6. Drive long-term results.

So you write a post on your blog, promote it on your social channels and hopefully get some shares. After that initial flurry of activity, the traffic driven by that post will slow to a trickle. And that’s the end of that, right?

Not by a long shot. That page is now ranked in search engines. Just like the rest of the static pages on your website, this blog may continue to be visited as long as it's on the web. In fact, a website with a substantial amount of blog content can continue to boost total traffic from old blog posts, providing the potential of a pretty substantial return on the few hours you invested in writing a post

From a practical standpoint, adding a blog to your small-business website may just make sense. With minimal expense and effort, you can help to boost search engine rankings, build credibility, increase website traffic and foster relationships with customers. This, in turn, may make your readers more likely to hire you or purchase products from your company, in addition to recommending your business to others.

Photo: Getty Images

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