Prevent A Customer Service Disaster With These Cloud-Based Apps

Whether you’re a large business with fulfillment centers located around the globe or a tiny mom-and-pop shop, chances are you occasionally receive a complaint call from a customer. Even if your operation is a small shop with a handful of customers each day, if you aren’t using cloud-based help desk software, disaster may be just around the corner.

When a customer is unhappy with an experience, businesses today are at a serious disadvantage. One post on a social media site like Facebook or Twitter can reach hundreds or thousands of customers, influencing public opinion and making a sizable dent in your bottom line. A business may never even hear about the bad experience, but for a small, local company it could spell eventual death, especially if the unhappy customer has a wide range of influence.

Companies can manually monitor each social media profile, but that takes time. Fortunately, there are several solutions that can ease the process for businesses of all sizes. The following apps can not only help you track any complaint calls, letters, and e-mails you receive, it can also help track online complaints so that you can respond to them as quickly as possible.

Deskero

Using Deskero, businesses can immediately empower customers to reach them through a variety of platforms, including e-mail, phone call, Twitter, and Facebook. Through a widget, businesses can also enable customers to place a ticket directly through their website, with all entered information immediately populating the Deskero ticket system. Deskero monitors all of a company’s social media accounts to find any posts and deliver them to the business. Once presented, someone from your business can immediately assign the conversation to a specific customer service representative for resolution.

FreshDesk

FreshDesk takes the work out of monitoring social media profiles altogether, automatically converting any Facebook or Twitter mentions into tickets for action. Within the FreshDesk portal, customer service agents can respond directly to those social media mentions, with those responses converted to social media posts. Additionally, FreshDesk brings your help desk team together, helping them categorize tickets, reassign as necessary, and assign and resolve tickets, all with just a few clicks.

Zoho Support

With Zoho Support, businesses can manage help desk tickets from a mobile device, making it ideal for the small business owner who is constantly on the go. The software offers Facebook and Twitter tabs to let businesses switch back and forth to easily monitor any social media posts. If a conversation begins on social media that needs to be converted to a ticket, this can be done directly through the Zoho Support portal. If at some point a large number of posts come through on an “emergency escalation” keyword specified by the business, Zoho Support’s interface sends an e-mail or SMS alert based on settings that are entered by the business at setup.

Social media has complicated the customer service process, challenging businesses of all sizes to keep up with complaints. These cloud-based tools can make the process easier, allowing time-challenged professionals to provide good customer service while still tending to the many other business duties they face each day.

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• License: Creative Commons image source

Kirill Bensonoff is a founding partner at ComputerSupport.com, helping small business executives get the most out of their technology investment.