15+ Best Customer Service Software Platforms for 2024 and How to Integrate Them

The success of your business depends on the satisfaction of your customers, which is sustained by the quality of service you provide. You must be able to support your customers across a growing variety of interactions — from sales channels, to email and helpdesk, realtime chat, and messaging, as well as in person. One customer service tool is often not enough to cover all of the touch points for an enterprise and its patrons.

This article explains the most important enterprise use cases for customer support platforms and lists the best customer service software tools available for 2024. It includes contact center, helpdesk, project management, and chatbot tools that your customer service staff can use to enhance your customer experience, and it shows how you can best leverage these tools to build a single customer view so that all of your customer data is readily available in one place.

Your customers need to be able to contact your business and receive a timely response. They may wish to ask a question about your product before making a purchase, follow up on an order, or solve a problem with a previous purchase. Addressing customers’ issues quickly and accurately is paramount if you want their continued business and to maintain the good reputation of your company.

Doing this manually is a non-starter. Even in the pre-digital age, there was always a system in place to streamline managing customer interactions: rolodexes, printed invoice and customer feedback templates, carbon copies, tickler files, etc. Fax, telephone, and pen-and-paper mechanisms were always being iterated on and improved, just like their digital successors.

Below we review the best customer service software for a variety of enterprise use cases and look at what they can do to improve your customer support experience.

Contact center software centralizes your communications with your customers. This category of support tool provides features including multichannel communication that lets you consolidate your interactions across voice/phone, email, chat, and social media into one location, call and chat routing so your agents receive enquiries based on their availability and specialty, and communication logging so you can inspect interactions and continually improve your processes.

Ideally, contact center software will also provide or integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) software for storing logs, maintaining customer details, and scheduling follow-ups. Increasingly, contact center platforms are also including AI assistants that can respond to customers looking for basic information, allowing your support team to focus on the customers who need the most help.

• Advanced routing: Automate call distribution and add interactive voice prompts to improve efficiency

• Integration with business and customer support tools: Connect with Zendesk, Salesforce, and other popular support tools

• Monitoring and reporting: Monitor calls in real time and view analytics

• Helpdesk: Provide your customers with a combined contact center, helpdesk, and knowledge base

• AI chatbot: AI support agents can help your customers by learning from your support content

• Proactive support: Pre-empt common customer questions with automated messages and onboarding to reduce agent workloads

• Skills-based intelligent routing: Automatically categorize and route support queries to the agents with the most appropriate skills to resolve them

• AI automation: Provides AI-driven tools including chatbots, predictive engagement, and

  voicebots

• Customer journey management:Track your customers through the support process and collect analytics to ensure success

• Agent call scripts: Ensure consistent messaging with scripts tailored to each call

• Do not call (DNC) compliance: Comply with regulations for your inbound and outbound communications

• Call quality monitoring: Monitor and guide your agents during calls to make sure your customers are getting the best possible experience

Ticketing and helpdesk software receives, stores, and organizes incoming service requests (referred to individually as tickets) and allows support teams to respond through a variety of communication channels. Customer support platforms in the helpdesk category should provide functions for ticket management so agents can see the status of enquiries and make sure everything is taken care of, workflow automation to reduce the number of repetitive tasks, and reporting and analytics so that you can measure the time it takes to respond and whether there are issues that are going unresolved.

Many ticketing and helpdesk platforms are also expanding to provide knowledge base and self-service portals. These allow you to publish documentation, so that customers who want to seek their own answers are able to, and publish responses to enquiries so that they are publicly visible to others who have the same question. Both of these tools can drastically reduce load on your support staff if implemented properly.

• Messaging and live chat: Allow your customers and support team to chat in real time

• Voice: Offer your customers phone support via internet or telephone

• Community forums: Facilitate self-service and allow your customers to help each other

• Ticket automation: Automatically assign tasks based on agent skills and workload, and use scenarios to perform multiple actions with a single click

• Customer self-service: Provide a knowledge base and self-service portal to customers who want to seek their own answers independently

• Customization: Build fully customized, cloud-hosted customer portals tailored to your brand and requirements

• IT service management (ITSM) capabilities: Tailored to IT service management, connecting IT, development, and business teams to aid collaboration

• DevOps integration: Integrate with development workflows for rapid issue resolution

• Templates: Get started quickly with pre-built templates for request types, workflows, and other components for a complete service experience

• CRM: Integrate customer data from marketing, sales, customer service, and other sources all into one dashboard

• Website builder: Quickly create simple business pages with a drag-and-drop website builder

• Meeting scheduling: Add links to a meeting scheduler on your emails and websites that syncs to your calendar

• Service-level agreements (SLAs): Define your commitment to your customers and set different response times for different criteria

• Sentiment analysis: AI scans support threads to determine whether customers are satisfied (or not), allowing you to far more efficiently track customer success

• Advanced response editor: Respond quickly to your customers using pre-written snippets and keyboard shortcuts

Project management platforms are used internally to plan and track the implementation of projects — for example, to track training, process optimization, or knowledge base development. Project management tools should provide task and subtask tracking, organization and categorization, scheduling, and resource management so that your team can keep all of the information related to a project in one place. They should facilitate collaboration and, like the other tools, provide analytics and reporting so that you can make sure your team is hitting the right KPIs.

• Project views: Organize your work by list, calendar/timeline, Gantt chart, or Kanban board

• Custom fields: Sort, filter, and report on custom data entry fields

• API integrations: Connect other platforms to Asana to interact with data in it

• Butler automation: Automate tasks and workflows

• Power-ups: Connect Trello to other services like Google Sheets, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and more

• Templates: Start with a blueprint based on the successful workflows of others

• Modular building blocks: No/low-code components for easy customization of your project management system

• Powerful automation: Flexible automation options to improve productivity

• Widgets: User interface components that make project status more visible, including tables, overviews, and board updates

• Card table: A unique variation on the Kanban board that is ideal for tracking workflows and monitoring task progression

• Hill charts: An unambiguous representation of project status that avoids unclear percentage-based measures

• Lineup: Shows all project statuses on a single timeline for an overview of all work in progress

Chatbots have been around for a while and had a poor reputation for providing canned responses that weren’t always helpful. This has changed with the arrival of conversational AI platforms that respond in natural language.

Traditional chatbots can follow predefined rules and scripts to respond to enquiries, allowing them to guide users and provide broad information. Conversational AI does much more than this, intelligently interpreting your customers’ questions using natural language processing (NLP), pulling information from your own documentation to construct the right answer, and implementing machine learning (ML) so that it can evolve its responses based on new information.

Chatbots and conversational AI let you scale your customer support processes. Often they can handle a large proportion of incoming enquiries, allowing your agents to focus on the most important, high-value customers and tasks.

• Multi-agent responses: Multiple AI agent bots can work via a single WhatsApp number, improving response times

• Abandoned cart recovery: Send personalized messages to customers to encourage them to complete abandoned purchases

• ChatGPT integration: Sell products directly on WhatsApp using ChatGPT bots that can understand customers and complete transactions

• Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and SMS automation: Cross-platform chatbot that can automatically respond to customer queries

• AI assistant: Use AI to help build your automations

• Templates: Ready-to-go conversation templates

• Internal business use cases: Provide self-service HR, payroll, and other administrative functions to your staff

• Automation consulting: Tars will work with you to design solutions that optimize your workflows

• Enterprise-grade security: Tars implements security best practices including zero trust and the principle of least privilege, and is compliant with regulations such as SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR

• Drag-and-drop chatbot builder: Botsify allows anyone to easily program a chatbot

• Third-party integrations: Connect to Slack, Shopify, Google Sheets, and other services

• Agent fallback: Let a human take over if the chatbot fails to resolve the issue or a personal touch is required

These platforms are often specialized, so one tool is unlikely to do everything you need it to. Therefore, you need to consider the possible side effects of adopting a new tool into your larger workflows. If the tool works well, you will come to rely on it in the long term, moving your data into it and building your processes around it. You must look at the history and reputation of the vendor and make sure that they provide a path to moving your data out of their service — otherwise it will be difficult to migrate to another tool in the future if the quality suffers, the price rises, or its functionality falls behind its competitors.

If your workflows are highly bespoke and rely on custom implementation, take care to avoid technical debt. Relying on workarounds and quick fixes to keep your customer support infrastructure up and running could result in costly ongoing maintenance (or an abrupt halt to your customer service if things fall apart).

You must also think about your future needs: there may be something that a tool doesn't do that you don't need now, but if you’ll need it as your business grows, you should include it in your initial requirements.

Some commercial software tools claim to be able to cover all of your customer support needs, but using a single tool comes with some risks. You lose choice and flexibility, you’re locked into their way of doing things, and all of your eggs are in one basket — if the platform experiences a problem, your entire customer support process is dead in the water.

Enterprises are increasingly eschewing the traditional approach of using a single commercial application to host their data and power their businesses. Instead, the trend is towards using multiple software tools and platforms: a combination of in-house software and best-in-class products to fill the specific role they are best suited for. This creates an ecosystem of business tools tailored to how you do things, fitting with the best practices that work for your industry, employees, and customers.

However, integrating multiple customer service tools into one location is much easier said than done. Fortunately, there are tools to help with this.

Appsmith is a low-code application platform that lets you quickly and easily build your own customer support applications. It provides a click-and-drag interface for placing UI widgets like buttons, tables, and form inputs, and connects to a wide range of data sources including popular customer support platforms. By using Appsmith you can choose the customer support tools that work best for you and unify the data they collect into a single customer support interface.

Applications built with Appsmith can connect to data from your sales, support, helpdesk, and project management software. When a customer request comes in, your customer support team members can find the customer and immediately see all of their interactions with your business across different channels and platforms, as well as the internal status of their enquiry including internal notes. Your agents can then assess, prioritize, and rapidly respond to customer enquiries with up-to-date information.

If there is functionality that you require that isn't provided by a commercial tool, you can implement it yourself. You can use templates to accelerate the early stages of development, and test your Appsmith apps before deployment to ensure reliability.

Appsmith is free and open source with no limitations (you can even host it yourself). For mission-critical applications you can sign up to our Business or Enterprise plans for additional functionality and support.

Companies including AWS, Dropbox, and ByteDance are building their own custom apps with Appsmith. Both small and large businesses are benefiting from being able to integrate their data from the best customer service software and accelerate their customer support with automation and streamlined interfaces.

One popular use case we’ve been assisting our enterprise users with is combining Zendesk and Jira to connect external and internal support tools. This allows support teams to quickly match incoming customer enquiries with actions being taken by their technical teams and provide status updates and problem resolutions with a much shorter turnaround than using the Zendesk and Jira platforms separately.

If you want to see how Appsmith works in action, we've put together a live coding session that shows how you can put together your own customer support solution in hours, not weeks.

Take Appsmith out for a spin

We're open-source, and you can self-host Appsmith or use our cloud version, both free.

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