The 7 Best Customer Service Software Solutions For 2024

Companies like Amazon, Apple, and Publix have a strong reputation for delivering exceptional customer service. 

That’s a big reason why their customers trust them and purchase from them repeatedly. 

In fact, their focus on delivering top-notch customer service has helped them position themselves as top brands in their respective industries.

How do they do it?

By providing their customer service reps with the tools they need to manage all customer interactions in one place, collaborate with internal team members, understand customer requests and respond effectively, and more.

Also, by investing in tools and setting up processes that allow their customers to reach out to customer service reps effortlessly, capture bugs/issues, and find solutions without always needing human intervention.

This guide offers a deep dive into the seven best customer service tools that you can use to deliver exceptional customer experience.

But we’ll get to that in a moment. 

Let’s understand, what according to us, a customer service software is.

What is customer service software?

A customer service software is a tool or platform that companies can use to empower their customer service department to deliver a great customer experience and their customers to find solutions to their queries/issues and connect with the company’s support team effortlessly. These include different types of software offering different features like live chat, knowledge bases, ticketing systems, AI writing assistance, bug reporting, and more.

When someone uses the phrase “customer service software,” they often mean “a centralized system to track, manage, prioritize, respond to and resolve customer issues.” 

However, that’s not the only use case. 

There are several other customer support solutions that serve different purposes. 

For example, you can use LiveChat, a widely popular customer support platform, to implement live chat on your website. Making it easier for your customers to get instant support. 

Another popular tool among customer service teams is Wordtune, our AI-powered writing assistant. 

Our existing customers use Wordtune in several interesting ways, of which a notable one is paraphrasing their replies to sound as on-point as possible. Helping them increase their Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).

An example:

💡Essential Reading: How AI Improves Customer Support: 6 CS Use Cases for Wordtune

Let’s dive a bit deeper into the different types of customer service tools.

What are the different types of customer service tools?

1. Live chat software: to implement live chat on your website, provide quick answers to customer queries, and connect them with your customer service representatives.
2. Help desk software: to bring all communications under one platform, assign tickets to the right representatives, and track past conversations and the progress until resolution. 
3. AI-writing assistant: to understand your customers’ queries and respond to them effectively without sounding robotic or to ensure clear and consistent communication.
4. Knowledge bases: to create and manage a centralized database of frequently asked questions, how-to guides, and tutorials, which can help your customers find answers to their queries without seeking human support.
5. Video support tools: to record videos for detailed walkthroughs, demonstrations, or when an issue requires a more personal touch.
6. Bug reporting tools: to provide your customers with the much-needed tools to report bugs or technical issues.
7. Feedback collection tools: to gather customer feedback through surveys, polls, and feedback forms.
8. Social media listening tools: to discover brand mentions and engage with customers on social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram.

Now that we’ve looked at the different types, let's dive deeper and identify the leading tools within each category.

‍

The top 7 customer service tools for 2024

Let’s look at the best (our favorite) tool for each category mentioned in the above section. 

‍

So, without further ado, let’s get started.

1. LiveChat

Best for: Implementing live chat on your website

LiveChat is a comprehensive customer service platform with help desk, live chat, and web analytics capabilities. While the platform offers several functionalities, it majorly stands out for its industry-leading live chat feature. Aside from customer service, you can also use it to generate leads and proactively reach out to potential customers. 

LiveChat offers a clean and user-friendly interface and offers several features, of which some key ones include:

• Widget customization: you can easily integrate the LiveChat widget into just about any website, without requiring any coding knowledge. And also customize it as per your needs such that it matches your branding elements. 
• Adaptable to different screen sizes: the live chat widget is responsive to screen size, so you don’t have to worry about it looking weird on mobile phones or tablets.
• Offer multilingual support: LiveChat lets you set up your widget in nearly 45 languages. Making it a great option for global brands. 
• Canned responses: LiveChat's chat system is highly efficient, and it simplifies the setup of canned responses. This feature is a time-saver, especially when dealing with repetitive customer inquiries.
• Tagging system: LiveChat offers a tagging system, allowing your customer support reps to add tags to chat history. And also archive chats. 
• Rich messaging: you can also incorporate buttons, clickable menus, quick reply suggestions, text cards, text carousels, and even allow customers to book appointments or make payments directly within the chat. 
• Screen sharing and video/voice communication: LiveChat also makes it super-easy for customers to share their screens, send images, and facilitate video/voice communication. 
• Sneak-peek: a standout feature is “Sneak-Peak,” which allows your agents to preview a portion of the message your customer is typing before they hit send. This feature can help your agents prepare answers more effectively and respond faster.
• Chat transfers: LiveChat also makes transferring chats effortless to make sure customers receive assistance from the most qualified team members. 

Other than these, LiveChat offers exceptional analytics and team management features. Lastly, LiveChat can easily be integrated with more than 200 third-party software, including WhatsApp, Zoom, and Shopify. 

So, suppose you use WhatsApp as a communication channel with your customers. LiveChat’s WhatsApp integration makes it a breeze for your customer service agents to manage their WhatsApp chats inside LiveChat.

However, the platform has its fair share of limitations: 

• First of all, there’s no free version of this tool. While you can opt for the 14-day free trial, that’s all you get. Also, you can preview LiveChat on your homepage, but nothing more than that.
• Secondly, the Starter plan doesn’t include premium features like file sharing, SMS, private canned responses, chat takeover, and many others, which is a letdown.
• Lastly, the platform is not packed with tools like knowledge base builder, which is another letdown. 

‍

2. Zendesk

Best for: Accepting, organizing, managing, and responding to customer service requests

Zendesk is a widely popular and used customer service software packed with several features to help customer service teams deliver exceptional support. These features include a ticketing system, messaging and live chat, knowledge base, and more. 

Zendesk is well-known for its powerful help desk and ticket management features. The platform brings all customer communications in one place. 

So whether your customers reach out to you via email, live chat, or social media, Zendesk brings all of these conversations into a unified interface. Making it easier for your customer support teams to keep track of these requests and respond promptly.

No matter the platform your customer reaches out to you on, Zendesk will create a ticket. This ticket will comprise detailed information about the customer, their previous order history, loyalty status, past conversations, and more. 

Some of Zendesk’s core help desk features include:

• Brings all customer communications in one place: no matter the channel your customer reaches out to you on, Zendesk brings all conversations under one platform. This way, your customer support agents don’t have to worry about missing out on any customer queries or juggling between multiple platforms.
• Powerful automation features: Zendesk’s automation features take some burden off your customer service reps’ shoulders. You can set up the AI bot to answer common customer queries, interact with your customers when your support reps aren’t available, and more. You can also set up triggers to categorize, prioritize, and route tickets to the appropriate agents or departments.
• Unified customer profile: customer service agents can get a complete view of customers, including their past conversations, purchase history, support requests, and more. This way, whenever an agent approaches a ticket, they can get the complete context and deliver top-notch support. 
• Live chat and messaging: Zendesk offers built-in live chat and messaging tools that allow businesses to engage with customers instantly.
• 1,200+ Integrations: Zendesk integrates with popular software like Trello, Slack, Jira, MailChimp, and many more. 
• Team collaboration: if an issue requires input or help from other people in your company, Zendesk offers powerful collaboration features to make it easy to collaborate with internal team members. 

Let’s talk about Zendesk’s limitations:

• Zendesk is an extremely pricey help desk solution. Doesn’t even offer a free plan.
• Some users on G2 have reported their customer support to be very poor. It’s very weird for a company that offers a customer support solution. 
• Other than these, another downside is that the platform has a steep learning curve.

‍

3. Wordtune

Best for: Understanding customer requests, multilingual writing, and paraphrasing messages

Wordtune is a widely popular AI-powered writing assistant that aims to help customer support departments deliver exceptional support. The platform doesn’t offer traditional customer support tools like live chat, help desk, knowledgebase, etc. 

Instead, its core strength lies in helping customer support agents rephrase their messages for clarity, precision, and effectiveness. 

Some of Wordtune’s core features for customer support are:

‍

Multilingual writing

‍ Wordtune makes it super-easy to interact with global customers who speak in their native languages. It’s very hard to rely on old-fashioned tools like Google Translate, as they are not 100% accurate and can’t capture the subtleties of everyday language, especially slangs and colloquialisms. So, if you are a part of a global brand, rather than having to hire customer support reps proficient in different languages, you can save time, money, and efforts with the help of Wordtune. 

Your customer support agents can also respond to your customers in their native languages using Wordtune’s Spices feature.

‍

Paraphrase messages

‍Using Wordtune’s rewrite feature, your customer support reps can paraphrase their messages such that they seem professional and humble, no matter how difficult the conversation gets.

‍

Fix grammatical and spelling errors

‍The last thing you want is sending messages filled with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Wordtune can also help your customer support agents fix these issues with their messages.

‍

Improve clarity and conciseness

‍Wordtune’s Shorten feature can help your customer agents make their messages more concise and clear. 

‍

Switch tones

‍Your customer support reps can also use Wordtune to switch from casual to formal tone and vice-versa. By implementing Wordtune company-wide, you can ensure that your team communicates in a consistent manner. 

‍

Some of Wordtune’s limitations are:

• The free plan may seem quite limiting. However, considering that our platform is very easy to use and the paid plans aren’t expensive, it may be worth switching to one of the paid plans.
• Wordtune is an AI-powered writing and productivity assistant, rather than a full-fledged customer service software. 

‍

4. Helpjuice

Best for: Creating a self-serve knowledge base

Helpjuice is a full-fledged knowledge base software to help companies create self-serve knowledge bases. Taking some burden off their customer service department and answering common customer queries/issues instantly, without requiring your customers to contact your support team. 

Some of Helpjuice’s core features include:

• Set up a knowledge base: Helpjuice offers some powerful features to help companies set up knowledge bases effortlessly. The platform also makes it a breeze to restrict/allow the knowledge base to be public, internal, or partially internal on either category, article, or the entire knowledge base level. 
• Google-like search: Helpjuice also comes with powerful search capabilities, to make it easier for your customers to search articles based on the issues they’re facing.
• Extensive branding and customization capabilities: The platform offers more than 12 themes and advanced customization options to help you set up a knowledge base with your company’s branding elements. The company also offers top-notch customer support, which includes free expert customization of your knowledge base.
• Multiple versions: You can work with multiple versions of the same article and also easily restore a previous version, as per your needs. Just like how you do it inside Google Docs.
• Powerful collaboration features: You can easily collaborate with other team members by adding comments and responding to them on knowledge base articles. Making team collaboration feel like a breeze. 
• Extensive authoring and formatting features: To be considered a powerful knowledge base software, your software needs to have powerful authoring and formatting features, which makes it easy to format articles as per the company’s or specifically author’s needs. 
• Easy structuring: You can assign categories and add your articles to folders to maintain a structured approach. 
• Powerful integrations: Helpjuice offers powerful integration options with companies like Slack, Salesforce, Zendesk Support, Freshdesk, Zapier, etc.
• API integration: You can integrate a Helpjuice knowledge base with a chatbot using an API to direct the user to a relevant knowledge base article.

Some of Helpjuice’s limitations are:

• Helpjuice doesn’t offer a free version. And the most basic plan (Starter plan) is quite expensive. 
• Some users (on G2) have reported problems with their text editor.
• The platform doesn’t offer a user-friendly interface, there is still room to improve in that aspect.

‍

5. Loom

Best for: Creating video walkthroughs

Loom, acquired by Atlassian, is an online video messaging tool with powerful video and screen recording capabilities. For many customer support teams, Loom is their go-to platform when they feel communicating via text wouldn’t be enough to solve their customers’ issues. 

Some of Loom’s key features include:

• Screen recording: Loom makes it super-easy to record screens, whether it's for a full-screen demonstration, a specific application window, or even just a browser tab. This is especially useful for walking a customer through a complex process or demonstrating software functionalities.
• Camera capture: Loom offers the ability to record both the screen and the presenter’s face with its powerful camera capture functionality. Putting your customer service reps’ faces can help you deliver a more personalized experience. 
• Instant sharing: As soon as you’re done recording a video, Loom will create a shareable link, which you can share with your customers. Loom also offers top-notch privacy settings to ensure that your videos are only accessible to the intended recipients. You can share these videos via email, make them accessible to everyone in your organization, and set them public. You can also embed your Loom videos (fixed size or responsive size) across different channels either directly or using an embed code. 
• Add elements of interactivity: You can also add elements of interactivity to your videos, like CTAs, comments, emojis, and tasks.  
• Powerful collaboration features: You can loop in teammates and get their suggestions to provide powerful responses to your customers and work together to resolve issues faster.
• Cross-platform availability: Loom offers an intuitive interface and is available as a Chrome extension, desktop app (for Mac and Windows), and mobile app (for both iOS and Android).
• Dedicated customer service software integration options: You can easily integrate Loom with customer support tools like Intercom, Zendesk, and more. 

Here are some of Loom’s limitations:

• Some users have reported frequent crashes with the Desktop application on both Windows and Mac.
• Even though Loom’s focus is making their application as user-friendly as possible, several users have been annoyed by constant bugs and technical glitches. 
• You need an active internet connection, but we don’t see it as a major downside. 
• Loom is a video communication tool and not a full-fledged customer support software.

‍

6. Usersnap

Best for: Reporting bugs and collecting customer feedback (for SaaS businesses)

Usersnap is a customer feedback platform that makes it convenient for customers to report bugs and technical glitches. And for customer support teams to collect customer feedback. It’s an excellent tool for product development and customer success teams to collect feature requests. However, it’s also an excellent platform for customer support departments.

Some of Usersnap’s key features include:

• Feedback button and menu: Usersnap makes it a breeze for customers to report bugs and technical glitches without having to use a screenshot software and record a Loom video. Instead, they can just use this feature to capture screenshots and videos. 
• Project management dashboard: Once the user reports a bug, it’s possible to assign the ticket to a specific team member, prioritize the issue, and track its progress from inception to resolution right within the Usersnap platform.
• Annotation tools: When users capture screenshots or videos, they can highlight specific areas, add text comments, or use drawing tools to illustrate the problem more clearly. 
• Collect feedback through surveys: Usersnap makes it possible to launch NPS, CSAT, polls, and thumbs up or down surveys by user events, time on page, or URL paths. 
• Customer service software integration options: Usersnap can be integrated with top customer service tools like Zendesk, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more. 

Some of Usersnap’s limitations include:

• Some customers have requested additional features like the ability to blur or hide sensitive information.
• The tool is positioned as a customer feedback platform for product development teams. However, it has a great customer support use case, for which dedicated features should be available.

‍

7. Sprout Social

Best for: Social media listening

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform. One of its key features for customer support teams is social media listening. This feature helps brands quickly discover what people are saying about them on social media. By actively monitoring brand mentions, and specific keywords. 

So whenever someone mentions your brand name on social media or a specific keyword you’ve requested the tool to monitor, you’ll quickly be notified about it. This can help your customer support department to deal with any potential issues and clean up any mess. 

Some of Sprout Social’s key features include:

• Multi-channel social media listening: Sprout Social lets you monitor social media mentions across different platforms like X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc. You can also monitor mentions across forums like Reddit. 
• Monitor keywords/hashtags: You can also monitor specific keywords or hashtags. For example, you can use Sprout Social to monitor a product name mentions on social media.
• Real-time alerts: Immediate notifications for brand mentions or specific keywords to ensure timely engagement.
• Comprehensive dashboard: A unified view of all social interactions, streamlining the process for customer support teams.
• Integration options: You can integrate Sprout Social with popular customer support tools like HubSpot, Zendesk, Salesforce, and more.

Some of Sprout Social’s limitations are:

• The platform has a steep learning curve.
• Sprout Social is very expensive and doesn’t even offer a free plan to get started.
• The social listening tool is only a part of a custom-built enterprise plan, and not available with other paid plans.

‍

Conclusion

Aside from the ones listed in this post, there are several other customer service tools to consider. Our goal, here, was to put the best tools across different categories in front of you, rather than bombarding you with dozens of options.

Hope this post was helpful.