Great customer support can be a game changer for your small business.

While many factors are critical to the success of your business, it comes down to one simple question: are your customers satisfied?

The quality of customer experience you offer your clients can break or make your business, especially if you are just getting started.

Actually, according to a report by Salesforce, positive customer support experience encourages 94 percent of consumers to continue buying from the same brand, highlighting the important connection between customer support and business customer retention.

Customer support software has proved to be essential in helping improve the quality of the support you deliver to your customers.

Essentially, these software can enhance customer experience by providing a platform to manage support requests, streamline communication, and automate issue resolution tasks.

Do you want to simplify your customer interactions? In my article last week, we looked at the best conversational AI platforms that’ll help you simplify interactions with your customers, and deliver a great customer experience.

In this article, we will discuss the best customer support software for startups and small businesses to help you enhance customer experience and increase ROI.

Let’s get started.

Quick Summary

1. Glassix - Best support software for small business

2. Helpscout - Best customer support software with knowledge base

3. Giva Inc - Best customer support software for hospitals and healthcare

4. Happyfox - Best customer support solution for IT companies 

5. WotNot - Best platform with a complete chatbot solution

How to Choose Customer Support Software for your Startup

a) Identify your Business Needs

Before you go dispensing your spend for customer support software for your startup, identify and evaluate your needs to ensure that the software can help you accomplish your goals.

Consider the pain points and challenges you are experiencing in your small business to help you narrow down your options and focus on the solutions that match your requirements.

b) Keep in Mind Scalability

You expect customer support software to help you grow your business. The software’s scalability refers to how well it can adapt to your growing business needs.

Therefore, ensure your software can accommodate needs like more users and features and consider the options and limitations of scaling up.

c) Consider Integration Capabilities

When choosing a customer support software it is important to consider how well the software integrates with other tools and systems you use in your business.

Unparalleled integration with tools such as your CRM, social media, and email, enables you to streamline workflows and automate tasks to enhance customer experience.

d) Check for Desirable Features

With different customer support software in the market, you expect them to offer different features and capabilities. Ensure you compare before making a choice.

You can choose the best customer support software by considering the features you cannot do without such as automation and integration features.

e) Consider Collaboration Options

Effective collaboration is a key aspect of customer support as it ensures coordinated responses and streamlined operations to help deliver a consistent customer experience.

When choosing customer support software, look for collaborative features that enhance teamwork such as internal communication tools and shared inboxes.

1. Glassix 

Glassix is an innovative customer communication management software powered by GPT-4  solution that streamlines all your business communications.

Packing robust features such as cross-channel communication, integration features, and a conversation routing engine, Glassix is one of the best customer support software in the market right now.

But how does it actually work?

Glassix allows you to have all your business communication in one place, with the conversation routing engine delivering an effective customer experience by allowing you to set up customized routing rules that automatically assign conversions to qualified agents.

And because having a support team working round-the-clock can be costly for a startup, Glassix provides an affordable way to allow you to be there for your customers 24/7, thanks to chatbots, that you can launch and deploy to all channels in a click.

Additionally, the live chat option is fully customizable allowing you to make changes that fit your brand and color palette. If you have an app, your customers can enjoy this feature through in-app messaging.

As a small business owner in 2024, you can leverage Glassix’s features to save time resolving customer issues and enhance their overall experience.

Key features:

• Glassix’s real-time agent takeover allows your agents to closely monitor chatbot conversations and take over when necessary to improve customer satisfaction.
• Glassix has a visual chatbot builder that enables you to easily build chatbots without any code and launch them to help you enhance customer support.
• Omnichannel communication allows you to instantly respond to customer requests via iMessage, WhatsApp, and Messenger, to name a few.

Pricing:

Starting plan: $49 per agent/month.

2. Help Scout

Help Scout offers robust features that are easy to use.

Using a platform like Help Scout allows you to have all your conversations under one roof so that you can easily deliver great customer support.

As a small business, it is important to give each customer great and VIP treatment. Well, it's possible through Help Scout as it ensures that your agents have all the customer details they need to deliver personalized customer support.

To back this up, the software’s incredible integration with over 50 apps and CRMs allows you to pull in more information such as CRM activity, order history, or other relevant information.

Additionally, save your team time while still providing your customers with what they need by building your own self-service help center. This allows your customers to help themselves and results in fewer support requests, 24/7 support, and enhanced customer experience.

Help Scout is a great customer support software for small businesses in 2024 that are on a budget. However, you will have to compromise on some features such as real-time interactions that are available in Glassix.

Key features:

• The software’s self-service help center allows customers to help themselves which reduces the number of customer requests, thus saving your team time.
• Help Scout’s AI supercharges customer support by taking care of repetitive and time-consuming tasks to allow your team to focus on more complex issues.
• Help Scout provides over 50 integrations to keep your business in sync and to save you the trouble of switching between applications and systems.
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Pricing:

Starting plan: $20 per user/month.

3. Giva Inc 

Giva provides a suite of products aimed at enhancing customer experience.

Its products include help desk, customer service, and knowledge management. This ensures that you get a robust system to supercharge your operations.

Giva is the best customer support system for your startup if you are looking for something easily deployable. Within minutes you will be up and running and since the software is intuitive and user-friendly, it will take a few hours to train your team.

It's even better considering that the software is fully cloud-based eliminating the need for software downloads, hard configurations, and installations. 

Additionally, Giva provides video tutorials, FAQs, and self-paced tours to facilitate training.

Business data involving your customer support performance can help you up your game. Giva, therefore gives you full visibility into actionable insights thanks to its real-time custom reporting & KPIs. Moreover, you can set up scheduled delivery of reports to help you make decisions.

Compared to other cloud-based solutions, Giva proves to be the best for startups as it is intuitive, easy to deploy, and requires minimal training resulting in low labor costs.

Key features:

• Giva provides top-notch security with its strong encryption and HIPAA-compliant hardened infrastructure to ensure that your customer data is secure.
• The software’s customer service ticket system helps your team to create and reuse knowledge so that they can expedite resolutions and save time.
• Giva’s Tsunami Ticket feature enables your team to link tickets to a single event providing an easier way of communicating updates on issue management.
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Pricing:

Starting plan: $59 per agent/month.

4. Happyfox

This ticketing system streamlines customer support operations.

Besides being one of the best customer support software, Happyfox is a workflow management platform that allows you to automate workflows to reduce the burden of manual and repetitive business processes.

Happyfox also offers a help desk feature from which you can manage all your customers’ request tickets. With its internal features and an arsenal of integrated third-party apps and integrations, Helpfox collects, organizes, and manages your incoming queries from all channels and provides you with effective ways to answer them.

But that’s not all. 

Instead of your data just lying around, this software helps you get the best out of it by providing analytics and reporting capabilities that are essential for making data-powered decisions.

Helpfox is an all-in-one customer support software that small businesses in 2024 can benefit from, from automating workflows to streamlining support request resolutions, all for the price of one. 

However, you will not get a tailored solution for your startup as you would with other solutions like Glassix.

Key features:

• Helpfox can integrate with several apps and software to enable you to work with all your favorite tools under one roof for enhanced productivity.
• The software has an AI chatbot that enables you to be there for your customers 24/7 while reducing the number of tickets and labor costs.
• Helpfox’s knowledge base helps you empower your agents and customers by promoting self-help to enable ticket deflection.
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Pricing:

Starting plan: $ 39 per agent/month.

5. WotNot

WotNot has great chatbots that can help boost productivity.

Building chatbots to fit your brand can be challenging and technical. 

However, that is not the case with WotNot as it takes coding out of the equation and provides drag-and-drop functionality allowing you to develop and launch chatbots easily.

With features such as a knowledge base, integrations, live chat, and FAQ Builder, you can save time on answering basic, repetitive, and boring tasks and instead focus on conversations that require human intervention.

You can build your own knowledge base to empower your FAQs which act as your first line of defense by answering common queries and handing over to an agent when necessary.

In addition to that, WotNot’s analytics provide business-centric KPIs that inform you of the state of your customer support helping you to improve the conversion rate on the chatbot and evaluate the business impact the chatbot has brought in.

WotNot is a great software with essential powerful features to help small businesses enhance customer support, but it lacks functionalities such as multi-channel communication that streamlines conversations across different channels. 

Key features:

• WotNot’s no-code chatbot builder enables you to easily build and launch a chatbot in different communication channels to power self-help.
• The software has a live chat feature that allows you to handle all incoming requests from your platforms instantly to enhance customer satisfaction.
• WotNot has an analytics dashboard that provides visibility into key metrics that help you understand your customers and make informed decisions.
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Pricing:

Starting plan: $49/month.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is small business customer support software?

Small business customer support software are tools and platforms that help small businesses manage, organize, and track support requests to enhance customer experience and increase ROI. 

With features such as automation, knowledge base, and chatbots, customer support software can streamline customer support operations.

Which is the best small business customer support software?

Several customer support software in the market are designed for different use cases and industries, including for startups and small businesses. 

However, Glassix proves to be the best solution for your support small team thanks to its robust features such as conversation routing and multi-channel communication that enhance customer experience.

How much does customer support software cost?

Different providers have products that vary in features and industry they are made for, warranting differences in prices.

Often, most customer support software offer several pricing plans with advanced features as the price increases. For instance, Glassix’s starting plan costs $49 per agent per month which makes it quite a bargain for your startup.

What are the key features of customer support software?

While features may differ between different customer support software, there are key features that the best platforms should have. 

Such features include ticket management & automation, multichannel communication, and integration capabilities to help in providing enterprise-level customer support.

What factors should I consider when choosing customer support software?

In order to help you make the right decision, you should keep in mind factors such as user-friendly interfaces for easy adoption, scalability to accommodate growth, essential features like ticket management and analytics, integration capabilities with existing tools, cost-effectiveness, and potential alignment with long-term business objectives.

Conclusion

Ensuring your customers are happy can be challenging.

Customers hate waiting and value great customer experience, necessitating the need for tools that can help you deliver quick support.

In fact, according to a recent study by Salesforce, 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services, indicating how crucial it is to provide instant customer support.

Thanks to customer support software, it is possible to better manage requests, organize them, and provide better customer support.

Hopefully, this list of the best customer support software can help you make an informed decision on what best suits your startup in 2024.

Glassix is particularly a great platform with offerings designed specifically for small businesses and can help you greatly streamline your customer support workflows.

Sign up here for a Glassix free trial and experience its services firsthand to learn how its features can help you deliver better customer support.