Working on the frontline of a support team is a huge responsibility, and a very varied role. It involves dealing with lots of aspects of the customer experience, from customer interactions and resolving queries, through to working with the product team on useful feedback.
Often in support, the pressure is on – how can you and your team achieve the best customer experience possible? This could depend on how much effort you put into carefully wording each support response, or how quickly you can find out what’s causing your customer’s problem.
There are loads of tools out there that can help you do your job more easily and make the customer experience even better.
Here are 14 tools that my team and I use every day to help our customers, without (almost) ever breaking a sweat!
Are you ready to increase your team’s efficiency? Provide a better employee experience and speed up internal support with Kayako HelpDesk. Discover Kayako Self Service
Communication tools
Support teams are the link between customers and the rest of the company, so it’s vital that they have the tools to collaborate with colleagues from the support team and other departments.
Here are a selection of tools that will help support teams collaborate with ease:
1. JIRA
JIRA is an issue management platform that allows teams to easily manage issues throughout their entire lifecycle.
How support teams can use it:
- Find and store information about bugs and feature requests in one place
- Track, plan and roadmap new product releases
- Communicate with the engineering team
Why is it helpful:
JIRA helps you bridge the gap between your engineering team and your customers. It also lets you see what your product team is up to, so you know if customer feedback is shaping your product!
Teams can create both public and private projects. Public projects are really helpful as they allow customers to vote for features or watch out for bug fixes. This way your team knows which module needs your quick attention, and which features are most often requested by your customers.
2. Trello
Trello is the free, flexible, and visual way to organize anything with anyone.
How support teams can use it:
- Gauge the progress of projects
- Gather feedback from team members on projects or ideas
- Compile a task checklist for processes and collect suggestions
- Keep yourself and other team members up-to-date
Why is it helpful:
A Trello board helps you keep of track of what different members of your support team are working on. Your entire team can manage their time and organize their work using cards packed with information.
It will show you the progress of projects and all the metrics of completed goals by individuals. It is open and collaborative, so anyone in your team can see what other team members are working on at any time.
3. Slack
Slack is a chat application which allows you to communicate with your team members. You can chat in open channels with your entire team (and other teams) or discuss things internally using private groups.
How support teams can use it:
- Lets you bring together internal communication and collaboration into one place
- Makes communication more direct and transparent across the team
- An alternative to email for communicating with team members
- Breaks down silos!
Why is it useful:
Slack is a powerful real-time tool that helps bring your remote teams closer together. It’s really helpful for support teams because it allows them to get an overview of what’s going on in other areas of the business, such as what strategies marketing is implementing, what your sales targets are, and status about the new releases.
It’s the best way to ensure everyone gets updates about all the new things happening in the organization, especially with remote teams.
4. Hackpad
Hackpad is a web-based collaborative real-time text editor.
How support teams can use it:
- Collaborating with team members on different cases or projects
- Sharing documents amongst the team
- Storing information, and gathering others’ input
Why is it useful:
Hackpad allows you to share the information with your support team in real-time, particularly if you’re in an escalated interaction and need to take notes for a case study.
Support teams handle so many escalated cases, and Hackpad makes it easy to prepare by taking notes in real-time with input from your team members. Once the document is complete, you can share it with the entire team to review and it is always there for future reference.
Reporting and training tools
Next we’ll move onto training and reporting tools which can help you to strengthen your team.
Training is an opportunity to expand the knowledge of all team members. A training program allows you to strengthen skills that each team member needs to improve. And with the help of reporting tools, you can gauge if your team is on right track.
5. Google Analytics
Google Analytics gives you information about what the traffic on your site is doing. You can use Google Analytics to analyze if your self-service content is effective and fulfilling its job.
How support teams can use it:
- Measure if your FAQs content is helping your customers
- Help your support team determine what exactly your customers are looking for
- Verify the effectiveness of your knowledge base
- Check the most popular section of your site where the most visits are
Why is it useful:
Google Analytics helps you turn customer insights into actions for your business. You can link it with your FAQ section to analyze search queries used by your customers. This will help you to move on right track for self-service content writing.
6. Grovo
Grovo is a training tool using microlearning processes. It offers short, smartly-engineered instructional bursts that are proven to command attention and generate retention.
How support teams can use it:
- Onboard your entire team by assigning training, and start tracking their progress
- Managers can ensure all their team members’ training is complete
- Quickly get a high level overview of your team’s performance
- Reward the best scorers in your team
Why is it useful:
Every team needs training to keep them up to date on different topics. Support teams are trained on delivering the best possible customer service – going the extra mile to assist customers, marking a new bug, and diagnosing issues.
These days every organization has remote team workers requiring a complete learning ecosystem and Grovo is a great platform to train your team no matter where in the world they are.
You can upload your own content for upcoming product releases, test your team on it, then generate reports to see where everyone stands!
7. Typeform
Typeform makes it easy to build and share beautifully designed online forms and surveys. Typeform is useful for any department to collect feedback, not just support teams.
How support teams can use it:
- Creating customer surveys to get feedback on your product or your service
- Gathering internal feedback from your team to improve and enhance support processes (Typeform have a 360 degree template perfect for this)
Why is it useful:
The support team’s focus revolves around helping customers and collecting feedback. Typeform is useful for collecting feedback through surveys (and even quizzing your customers!).
Even your managers can use it for collecting team feedback. It is easily configurable, offering you a variety of inbuilt templates to use. It also gives you reports and analytics.
Email tools
Email is the number one communication tool for support teams. It’s the primary way you connect with customers, your colleagues, and your team (apart from Slack of course!). But email has its limits – luckily, there are loads of tools you can use to make email work better for you.
8. Dropbox
Dropbox is an online platform to view, retrieve and share all your files from anywhere and with anyone.
How support teams can use it:
- Helpful in sharing any type of file with customers which can’t be sent via email
- Syncs files between your desktop, your colleagues’ desktops and online
- Your customers can also use it to share files or snapshots with you
Why is it useful:
Support teams can create a shared team folder in Dropbox which keeps the entire team on the same page. Each team member can get access from anywhere to saved files in this folder.
It is useful for your customers too! Most of our customers use shared hosting solutions which doesn’t allow you to send them big emails with lots of media. Instead, we save those large files online in Dropbox, and share the link to the Dropbox file in an email.
9. Grammarly
Grammarly allows you to simplify your emails and connect with your customers. It checks your grammar on emails and corrects any slip-ups.
How support teams can use it:
- Checks the grammar of emails so they are clear and easy to understand
- Detects complicated words or poor sentences, and even offers you an explanation for why it needs to be corrected
Why is it useful:
While replying to emails, who doesn’t want to be simple and clear in communicating ideas? Grammarly allows you to review your emails and spots mistakes for you. The best part is, it doesn’t just catch the errors but also offer you the suggestions to fix them.
10. Jing
Jing allows you to grab an image or create a quick video of anything on your computer screen.
How support teams can use it:
- Recording demonstration videos
- Taking snapshots and send them to the customers to demonstrate how to do something
- Making discussions easier by showing snapshots or videos to illustrate a problem or solution
Why is it useful:
Support teams are always looking for ways to help the customer and make things easier for them. Sometimes it’s much easier and quicker to show someone something than describe it to them.
11. Hemingway
Hemingway App is an editing tool that suggests ways to make your writing bold and clear.
How support teams can use it:
- Much like Grammarly, Hemingway helps make emails clear and easy to understand
- Highlights your errors to help you write flawless emails
- Gives detailed assists to make you send better emails
Why is it useful?
Hemingway helps you to write straightforward emails to your customers to present your ideas and solutions. Using Hemingway you can send clean and clear emails to your customers, avoiding passive voice or complicated words.
Diagnostics tools
We talked about the tools which help us with communication, reporting and training. But while supporting your customers, you need technical tools as well. They help you to trace and fix technical queries and issues – the things that your customers need your help with most of the time!
12. Firebug
Firebug is an add-on developer tool available in Firefox browser (press F12 to launch it!). It allows you to debug any kind of errors and monitor HTML, CSS, XMLHttpRequests or JavaScript in real time.
How support teams can use it:
- Inspect HTML and modify style and layout in real-time
- Use the most advanced JavaScript debugger available for any browser
- Accurately analyze network usage and performance
Why is it useful:
If a customer reports an error to your support team, the first thing to find out about the error is whether it’s a client side issue or something server side.
Firebug shows you the exact problem and makes it easy to gauge where the problem could be. You can make use of Inspect Element for inspecting a specific section of the page or code or script.
13. EditPlus
EditPlus is a text editor, HTML editor, PHP editor, Java editor and Hex Viewer for Windows. It offers many powerful features for web page authors and programmers.
How support teams can use it:
- Helps you quickly write up code in any language
- Provides auto-completion features to fill out functions
- Helpful editor for reading and understanding code
Why is it useful:
If your support team needs a more advanced tool for code reviews and development, EditPlus is perfect. When your customers need a small script to test functionality, your team can use EditPlus too.
It provides auto-completion which makes it easy for support to create new code either for a script or a simple web page. It also uses colour coding to make it easier to read and understand product code.
14. TeamViewer
TeamViewer is a remote access tool offering desktop sharing, file transfers, web conferencing and online meetings.
How support teams can use it:
- Support customers by watching their screen and remotely accessing their desktop
- Have audio and video support with customers (and train them too!)
- Take control and show the customer how to do it remotely
Why is it useful:
Sometimes customers have a problem where the only way you can help them is to talk them through it step-by-step. TeamViewer lets you access your customer’s desktop remotely and help them solve their problem, train them on your product, or get them set up directly on their machine without being physically present.
Now you have my pick of the best tools across communication, reporting, email and diagnostics to aid you in supporting your customers and your own team.
I’d love to hear which tools you use! Let me know in the comments 🙂