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When your customer base is small and customer support tasks aren’t very complicated, you can get away with pen and paper for a lot of customer queries or complaints. However, as your company grows, both in customers and staff size, you’re going to need some specialised software to keep your staff on top of things, following up on complicated support tickets and ensuring the quick response that all customers need.

Customer support software is a surprisingly diverse field, with a lot of competitors distinguished by pricing, extra features like social media integration, and overall complexity. There’s customer support software for newbies and startups all the way to the highly technical software suites used by large corporations and government offices, there’s free software and software that can cost up to hundreds of pounds in total, and it can be almost impossible to find customer support software that fits your budget, customer and staff size.

Here’s some customer support software that manages to meet most, if not all, of your company’s requirements:

Startups, Newcomers and SSBs:

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is one of the best Customer support software packages available for businesses who can’t cough up the money for a yearly subscription, as it’s free for small teams or individuals, and you can check if your company is eligible for that here.

On top of that, it’s both comprehensive enough for advanced users and accommodating enough for novices: its features consist of automated ticketing mechanisms, support inboxes accessible by the entire team, social customer support, knowledge bases or information portals, and community forums. The system also has integrated ticket-time tracking functionality that helps identify the bottlenecks that hamper support operations.

LiveAgent

LiveAgent prides itself on ease of use for people new to customer support software. Inside, you will find all vital help desk functions, including live chat, file sharing, contact forms, email support, and integration with social media. If you’re looking to go beyond the traditional help desk capacity, we suggest you look at the product’s gamification suite, POP3 accounts, and intuitive statuses that make LiveAgent different than its competitors. The same as with Freshdesk, you will be offered a comprehensive yet free trial to see what the product is about.

Mid-Size Businesses, Customer-Focused Businesses

Samanage

So what makes Samanage different from LiveAgent and Freshdeck? Completion of tickets and requests is one of the most cumbersome and time consuming tasks that some companies have to deal with, and Samanage can be used to streamline it. Initially, it will route support from the IT team to the self-service database, from where teams can later pull off best performance practices. It will also make it possible to monitor assets and contracts in real time, secure data better than most tools mentioned in this article, and manage and resolve incidents related to complex IT operations. In short, if you need tickets completed as quickly and accurately as possible, have a look at Samanage.

SalesForce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud provides users with a system for powerful customer engagement and interaction through popular channels, such as video and social media. With Salesforce Service Cloud, managing customer cases and other concerns is a breeze since they can be accessed from a single, unified interface. The platform is also built and optimized for various mobile devices such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Customers can also access the system’s knowledge base and reach out to other members within the Salesforce community who can help them with the issues they are experiencing. If you work heavily in social media and need to respond quickly, this versatile customer support system is ideal.

Whether it’s for employees or customers, companies need to receive feedback and give it to their employees in order to improve their services. However, when concerning employee feedback, should you make it anonymous or not?

You’ll read a number of takes online around this issue, and there’s a surprising balance between those who think feedback should be anonymous and those who shouldn’t. Both sides can make compelling arguments for and against anonymisation of feedback, and the applicability of anonymised feedback is dependent on the circumstances of the company. The Pros

Perhaps the strongest argument for anonymisation is that people won’t mince their words when describing problems that they may have. A lot of people aren’t keen on ‘causing a fuss’, and others may be worried that they’ll be disciplined for bringing issues up in a whistleblower-esque situation. Anonymous feedback goes some way to addressing these concerns, as when done properly it’s almost impossible to trace feedback back to its original source, making stinging feedback easier to send.

The sad fact of many organisations is while they say they like feedback, many organisations will downplay or outright ignore feedback that reveals glaring flaws in how the company works, and when employees bring it up in a non-anonymous feedback system, they may end up losing their job if the feedback ends up in the hands of people who aren’t receptive to negative feedback.

In essence, not only can anonymised feedback prevent employees from downplaying problems, it also protects them from retaliation by disgruntled employees and superiors who may not like inconvenient truths. ...And The Cons

However, there are some cogent arguments against anonymisation, the main one being how it may actually reinforce a culture of fear rather than reduce it. When someone feels they need to keep their feedback anonymous, it may invoke a sense of paranoia, even in companies with a healthy level of trust between employees and higher-ups.

From the perspective of the feedback gatherers, anonymised feedback may have some big disadvantages. For example, to avoid being identified in feedback that can be pointed to one person in some way, the person writing the feedback may make it too vague to be useful, or not bring it up at all. When this happens, the whole point of anonymous feedback is broken, since it’s meant to encourage honesty.

However, the positives and negatives aren’t universal attributes of anonymous feedback: the effectiveness of anonymous feedback can vary depending on the level of trust, openness and ability to point out serious problems without fear. Generally speaking, the more your employees are hung-up on job safety, the more effective truly anonymous feedback will be.