In a world where digitally-savvy customers generally prefer to solve problems themselves rather than reach out to agents, demand for the right tools increases. Today’s business leaders are looking for tools which help them to empower their agents and customers at the same time while improving workplace efficiency and performance.
There are dozens of different CCaaS solutions and intelligent online tools available for companies hoping to bring self-service into their CX strategy. However, some vendors are capturing more interest than others.
Let’s look at some of the top companies making waves in the self-service CX landscape.
1. Zoho
One of the most versatile and scalable CX companies today, Zoho offers many features to support modern companies. You can access everything from analytics tools to CRM insights and Zoho “Assist” to support remote customers instantly. Zoho’s Self-Service environment in the Zoho Desk ecosystem comes with various features to explore.
You can access an embeddable self-service plugin for mobile apps and websites or build a brandable help centre for customers to access online. There’s access to knowledge base building, and community building features too.
2. Freshdesk
Like Zoho, Freshdesk offers business leaders a range of empowering tools, from IT project management to automation workflows, reporting, and IT Service Management. There’s also a self-service portal for brands looking to empower their teams to accomplish more tasks alone. You can use this portal to let employees help themselves by raising tickets directly with the IT team.
Freshdesk can also assist your team members by allowing them to look up solutions directly within your knowledge base or track items in a service catalogue. Business leaders can even customise portals to suit the specific needs of their workforce. Plus, you can allow employees to identify and request the exact services they need from a software list.
3. Intercom
One of the market leaders in the self-service landscape, Intercom offers companies access to a “conversational support funnel”. This all-in-one environment ensures companies can automatically resolve a range of repetitive questions with help articles, chatbots, and more.
The self-service environment makes it easy to publish various types of resources for your customers, including blogs and guides. You can also embed apps and tools into your website environment and Messenger. Custom bots and automation options mean you can essentially build the perfect stack of self-service tools from scratch.
4. HubSpot
The HubSpot environment has virtually everything a business needs to grow, offering a wide selection of sales, service, and marketing tools in various dedicated “hubs”. Within the Service Hub from HubSpot, you’ll also find a comprehensive range of tools for self-service, including a dedicated “Customer Portal”. The Customer Portal allows customers to maintain ownership over their service experience and track the progress of support tickets.
HubSpot’s portal makes life easier for customers who want to keep track of their service requests; it can also support your teams. There are solutions for building automated workflows built into the ecosystem, with absolutely no coding required for beginners.
5. LiveChat
Best-known for bringing a new avenue of communication into the CX landscape, LiveChat makes it quick and easy to connect with your customers on the channels they most want to use. Aside from enabling chat with human agents, LiveChat also allows companies to create custom chatbots for generating leads, making help tickets, and more.
You can route chats and assist customers with in-built AI solutions and automatically segment customers based on what they’re doing on your website. The right client reaches the right agent whenever a conversation needs to be migrated to a human professional. On top of all that, LiveChat offers excellent security and phenomenal analytics too.
6. Kustomer
A leader in the customer service landscape and now part of the Meta ecosystem, Kustomer supports companies in delivering faster, more meaningful experiences to customers through omnichannel messaging and unified consumer views. You can build an SEO enhanced knowledge base, complete with a visual theme builder to make your design look fantastic.
There’s support for custom chatbot creation, with information collected straight from your CRM. You’ll also be able to create end-to-end automation, triggering actions like process returns with chatbots. What’s more, Kustomer empowers companies through code-free configurations, so you don’t need to invest in an expensive coding expert to start building self-service solutions.
7. HelpShift
Another company committed to enhancing CX in a changing service landscape, HelpShift enables companies to create more meaningful mobile and web-based support experiences. You can design all kinds of intelligent CX solutions, giving your customers the options to either chat in-app with your human agents or automatically solve problems with access to bots.
The great thing about HelpShift is how aligned all the features are. If your customer starts a support conversation with a bot and decides self-service isn’t right for them, your agents will be able to access the previous discussion for context. The HelpShift mobile help centre environment can also adapt to suit your unique branding.
8. Gladly
Gladly is all about making customer service as simple and painless as possible. With the self-service solutions from Gladly, you can provide your customers with a branded experience where they can quickly and easily find solutions to their problems without reaching out to a contact centre agent. You can either build your own dedicated help centre, where you can publish FAQ posts and articles, or you can design a dedicated chat widget and bot.
Gladly’s self-service offering features include everything from personalised IVR systems that can pull customer data from previous interactions to dynamic question answers from bots that adapt according to the page your client is visiting. You can even show customers relevant answers to questions in a variety of languages automatically.
