The imperative task in businesses is to deal with customers. Whether you own a small business or a large scale set-up, getting hold of new customers becomes a challenging task. Indeed, a lot of care is required to deal with your users.
This is an age of continuous connection – be it customers or be it a prospect. Improving customers’ experience dramatically can improve business growth and operational efficiency. Several approaches will help you practice better connections with your users. One such is through the investment in the customer service software. This way, you can retain and add new customers to your business by remaining in touch with the clients.
Overview of Software
If you want to nurture your business, then it becomes essential for you to retain your customers. You can make your clients happy and satisfied with amazing software.
What is customer service software?
The software is the technology that deals with the queries and complaints of the customers. This platform serves as a sort of database that maintains all types of customer data and interactions.
Across multiple channels, the business can manage inbound and outbound communications with the help of customer service functions. It helps in delivering service and resolving issues efficiently.
Who requires customer service software?
The software is helpful for full-fledged enterprises, small businesses, startups and freelancers. Let’s know-how!
Key aspects of Customer Service Software:
The core features of the software are as follows:
What will be the future of the customer service sector?
A recent study indicates that by 2023, the customer self-service software market will reach USD 13.00 billion. By going through the following points, you can make out what all aspects will affect the future of the sector:
What are the consequences of not having a customer service tool in an organization?
Your business can suffer from many hardships due to the absence of tools. The issues which you can face in an organization without having customer service application are as follows:
The best way to enjoy the productivity and efficiency of your organization is to invest in powerful software. There are plenty of tools that can meet the demands of your business.
Talking about the top customer support software, we recommend you to explore the below-given list of free and open source customer service software. These open source software can prove to be cost-effective and at the same time provide enhanced customization options.
Before we move onto the details about best free and open source customer service software, let's have a look at one of the most popular one in this category - Freshdesk.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a feature-rich, intuitive cloud-based customer service software that can help you provide excellent customer services, strengthen your relationships with your customers, and eliminate customer attrition, eventually enabling you to reach your sales and service goals faster. It is a data-driven customer service platform that helps you to measure your customer service metric accurately and lets you to implement proactive workflows for onboarding clients, retention, renewals, and beyond. Moreover, it also alerts your customer support teams to predict any customer service-related issue and make proactive decisions to protect your business reputation and bottom line.
(Source: Freshdesk)
Key Features
- Enables identifying which customer accounts require immediate attention and action, including customers’ likeness towards the products and their financial condition.
- Helps in reducing customer churn rate by providing complete information about your customers’ preferences and expectations
- Makes customer service workflows easy, leading to delighted customers
- Enables capturing massive amounts of data that helps in measuring the customer satisfaction level and improving service quality
- Helps in managing critical milestones in the entire buyers’ lifecycle process, which improves customer retention and business profitability
- Automates critical processes like customer onboarding, retention, and prioritization of queries, ultimately helping in growing customer value and loyalty
Best Free and open-source customer service software
1. Vision Helpdesk (free trial of 30 days)
Vision Helpdesk is the software that helps in simplifying customer support. It uses high-quality software like help desk software, satellite help desk, and service desk software.
Under one single roof, this all-in-one customer support tool manages various types of channels like web-forms, Twitter, Facebook, and calls. Across the globe, this app is trusted by 15000+ companies.
This app is perfect for ecommerce businesses, online businesses, software companies, web hosting companies, and the support industry. Even the organizations that want to support their customers via phone, chat, email, Facebook, and Twitter will find this tool apt.
(Source: Vision Helpdesk)
Key Features:
- Ticket and Case Management
- Incident and Problem Management
- Knowledge Share
- Reporting and Analytics
- Interaction and Workflow management
- Access and Usability
- Communication Channels
- Call Center
- Self Service Community
- Response automation
- Multi-channel help
- Alert or escalation
- Performance metrics
- Surveys and feedbacks
- Knowledgebase
- Email and Queue Management
- Social Media Integration
- Virtual Assistant
2. osTicket (free and open source)
osTicket is the free customer support software that allows you to scale and streamline customer service easily. This open source software will help you drastically improve your customer’s experience. This simple ticket creation tool is easy-to-use and suitable for small businesses. The customer portal of this app is reliable. It offers an efficient support help desk system.
You will find this web-based customer support platform simple and easy to use. This user-friendly app arranges, runs, and records incoming support requests. The software directs the inquiries created via email, web-forms, and phone calls.
(Source: osTicket)
Key Features:
- Dashboard Reports
- Configurable help topics
- Customer Support Portal
- Service Level Agreements
- Ticket Filters
- Custom fields, columns, and queues
- Help Topics
- Agent Collision avoidance
- Assign, transfer, and referral
- Auto-responder
- Thread action
- Service Level Agreement Management
- Advanced Search and tasks
3. Zoho Desk (free, free trial of 15 days)
Zoho Desk is free software with three users. It caters to businesses of all sizes. The software collects information from various media like social media, a self-service portal, forums, forms, email, phone, and chat. All these interactions are then presented in one place.
For analyzing customer satisfaction, the app offers customizable and scheduled reports, a graphical dashboard, and happiness ratings. The users can make custom changes that include customization of email templates and the addition of help folders along with the new departments.
The service agents can learn more about the clientele with the help of the Zoho customer relationship management (CRM) facility. In Zoho Desk, the tickets are logged in that assist in feeding customer information.
(Source: Zoho Desk)
Key Features:
- Ticket and Case Management
- Self-service/ Community
- Agent Productivity
- Zia, AI for customer service teams
- Automation
- Extensibility
- Insights and impact
- Customization
- Security
- Multi-channel Help Desk
- Process Automation
- Help Desk Customization
- Communication Channels
- Reporting and Analytics
4. Helpy (free trial 14 days, open source)
Helpy is the open source customer support software that provides a free trial of 14 days. Organizations that are serious about data control will find this app ideal. You can give your customers a heroic customer support experience by safeguarding the data without any compromise.
The app enjoys customizable functionality along with beautiful built-in reporting. It holds the features related to ticketing, help center, knowledge base, and community. The AI agent built into this app solves 50-80% of requests autonomously.
From anywhere you and your agent can provide support on any device like mobile, desktop, or tablet. There is a complete log of all the activities that include agent assignments and other changes in the ticket.
(Source: Helpy)
Key Features:
- Multi-channel ticketing
- Knowledgebase
- Multi-lingual
- Themeable
- Embed Widget
- Community Support Forums
- Mobile friendly
- Pre-wired for Google Analytics
- Ticket logging
- Self-service Portal
- IT Asset Management
- Real-time chat
- Email Integration
- Alerts /escalation
5. Zendesk (14 days free trial)
Zendesk offers a free trial of 14 days. This app allows you to have access to the features and functionalities of the customer service system. It serves as a sophisticated agent productivity tool that helps them to close cases faster. You will find a customizable front-end portal and live chat features. Salesforce and Google Analytics can form integrations with this tool.
It includes guided mode, business rules, pre-defined ticket actions, customer context, dynamic content, and collaboration. The tool holds the flexibility to tailor the Zendesk support that helps in meeting the needs of the team. You can access the analytics tool to measure and improve customer service. You will find this application a simple system to track and solve customer support tickets.
(Source: Zendesk)
Key Features:
- Seamless Channel Integration
- Ticket Forms
- Conditional and custom ticket fields
- Multi-brand
- Service Level Agreement (SLA) views
- Multi-lingual
- Custom Reports
- Performance Dashboards
- Configurable and customizable
- Personal opinions and macros
6. Helpspot (21 days free trial)
Helpspot is an amazing organizational ticketing system that allows you to keep track of user problems and requests quickly and easily. The businesses that hold the customer self-service portal, custom web forms, knowledgebase, tickets management, and trends tracking will find this app perfect. It offers 21 days free trial.
This powerful ticket management system filters, tracks, tags, and categorizes the data. It can store unique data with custom fields. With the matrix report feature, you can easily see trends and compare any data stored by this powerful ticket management tool. The customers and end-users get information through an email exchange, matrix reports, and custom fields with the help of this application.
(Source: Helpspot)
Key Features:
- Email Management and Email Integration
- Self Service Portal
- Surveys & Feedback
- Alerts/Escalation
- Knowledge Base
- Ticket Management
- Reporting and Automation
- Integrations and APIs
- Custom Branding
7. UUchat (open source, free)
UUchat is a free and open source software that believes in building and running a modern online customer service system. It offers a compact, convenient, and efficient system.
This hackable platform receives real-time online customer messages. You can effortlessly talk to people who are browsing your website or app with the help of this simple tool. Customer chat features support multiple platforms and offer simple and convenient access.
The user can enjoy the graphical table, intuitive, and easy to understand session details due to the system management technique of this app. With hacker features, you can own your code, control your data, and determine your functionality.
(Source: UUchat)
Key Features:
- Real-time chat
- System Management
- Customer Chat and Success
- Hacker
- Open source technology-driven
- Data Analytics
8. Helprace (30day free trial)
If you are hunting for excellent customer service, then Helprace will meet your requirements as it integrates multiple tools. In this single app, you will get tickets, email management, feedback, customer community, docs, and a knowledge base.
It is ideal for small or emerging businesses that believe in engaging with their customers. The app empowers support teams by providing a personalized one-on-one support experience. It believes in boosting productivity and collaboration.
By employing this solution, companies can track, manage, and sort conversations with their customers. You will find this app an easy way to manage customer-company interaction. There are standard features in this tool that includes sharing, tagging, images & video, notifications for agents, spam filtering, and badge counters.
(Source: Helprace)
Key Features:
- Ticketing and Email Management
- Customer Community and Feedback
- Docs and knowledge base
- Self-service Portal
- Collect Feedback
- Issue Tracking
- Customizable Portal
- Integrations
- Security and Authentication
- Teams, User groups, and Organizations
- Queue Management
- Surveys and Feedbacks
- Alerts/ Escalation
9. Diamante Desk (free and open-source)
Are you looking for highly reliable, flexible, scalable, and extensible software, then Diamante Desk is an apt choice for you. It is a free and open source software that will allow you to meet your unique business needs. The app allows for easy customizations.
The software is based on a modern technology stack (PHP 5, Oro Platform, Bootstrap, and Symfony2). It helps to bring the quality of customer care to a new level. The responsible department, employee, or resource gets the support tickets from this tool.
The companies make use of this powerful tool to identify the problems, issues with products or services, customers’ expectations, and opportunities to improve the same.
(Source: Diamante desk)
Key Features:
- Deep integrations with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems
- Complete control of the system via API (Application Programming Interface)
- Proper ticket assignments
- Automates internal support processes
- Ticket Management
- Knowledge Base
- Live chat system
- Alerts/Escalation
- Surveys and Feedback
- Email Integration
- Community Forums
Apart from the list mentioned above of the high-quality free and open source Customer Service Software; there is one more valuable software that is gaining popularity. Below you can explore the features of the same.
Kayako (popular)
Kayako is the popular software that you will find feature-rich. At your fingertips, you will get the customer information. You can effectively monitor, manage, and deliver customer support with the help of this app. It provides a 14-day free trial.
You can engage your customers and automate repetitive and standard customer service processes with this app. It is customizable and fully scalable. The solution is accessible via its mobile apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and tablets. You can be more productive with this tool. Your team can enjoy the best customer service experiences with this application.
(Source: Kayako)
Key Features:
- Live chat
- Shared inbox
- Data-driven
- Time tracking
- Self Service
- Workflows
- Integrations
- In-app SLAs (Service Level Agreement)
- Automation
- Collision detection
- Kayako Messenger
- Mobile Support
- Proactive Engagement
Boom your business with excellent customer service!
Businesses can run smoothly with exceptional customer services. All the customer issues and questions can be resolved and answered with this technique that ultimately helps you in retaining your valuable customers. With features like live chat, ticketing, phone systems, and knowledgebase; you can efficiently handle inquiries and issues of your clients.
Right away, you can respond to your clients by employing free and open source customer support software. It offers round-the-clock support and beliefs in prioritizing customer requests. Indeed, this technology is a boon for all sizes of businesses.
If you have come across any of the customer service management software, then feel free to share your precious views on the same. For more advanced features, you can explore - OXON, LiveAgent, Happyfox, Giva, piHappiness, Crisp.
